You're right that it doesn't quite feel the same (although it gets close), but you're wrong about the speed. Amiga Forever on my 1.8Ghz Laptop is faster than my real Amiga, which runs on a top of the range BlizzardPPC 68060@64, 603e@256!
As I say, I use a real Amiga when I'm at home, Amiga Forever is merely a tool to allow me to do work in Amiga applications when I'm away from home. Otherwise, the only option would be to do them in PC applications all the way, and since I feel much less creative when sitting at a Windows environment, Amiga Forever comes in handy.
As for presentations, PowerPoint IS good - it allows you to mix a whole host of multimedia into one presentation, allowing you to demonstrate and present whatever you wish. Hollywood is based around the same thing. In some ways the version I used to do my presentation was nowhere near as advanced as PowerPoint. In other ways it was far more advanced than PowerPoint, it's hard to explain. At the time, Hollywood had a text only interface - you literally had to program your own presentation.
At first I saw this as a major downfall and almost gave up on Hollywood completely before I'd even given it a chance. Then I saw a tutorial in "Total Amiga Magazine" and decided to give it a go. The disadvantages of a text based interface are clear but what is not so clear are it's advantages - which I only found out afterwards.
With a text based interface the possibilities are seemingly endless. You're not limited or tied to anything, your presentation can be whatever you make it. With PowerPoint, if you've seen a few presentations you've seen them all. Everything looks the same, nobody is able to do anything new and as such, it all begins to look a little bland. That gave me an advantage, because with Hollywood I was able to deliver a whole new presentation experience! A completely new look, new effects and transitions, and the presentation ran exactly as I intended it to, it wasn't binded to PowerPoint's same old interface.
The downside is time. A PowerPoint presentation can be knocked up in minutes, but since I had to literally program mine, it took hours of work. But when your presentation is regarded as the best of the whole bunch, that extra work is all worthwhile I think. Especially when the Windows machine being used for the PowerPoint presentations crashed and refused to reboot properly! The whole presentation was cancelled but I was able to go on because mine was done under AmigaOS!
These days Hollywood has a graphical interface for the creation of presentations - I'm still very eager to try that out.
So yeah, Amiga Forever can be an excellent tool. You don't have to desert the Amiga platform to appreciate it's use as a tool. I use my version as a tool, but I still come back to my real Amiga when I'm at home!
Brian
