What is MorphOS - a brief introduction for users familiar with C= Amiga

[Cammy]

I thought I'd help out with a screenshot showing MorphOS running on my new 396Mhz Efika, it's so fast and responsive:

[Cammy]

It looks like some people only used Amigas because they liked the ugly look of the default Workbench.

You all know the reason Workbench looked so plain to begin with was to inspire you to create something more visually appealing with it yourself? It's a blank canvas for the creative mind. It has always been more configurable than other systems, especially MUI which lets you determine the frame, fill, font, background textures/gradients and pixel distances for every single component of the GUI on a per-program or global basis. You can make one program look like Workbench 1.3 and another look like Windows Vista, it's all up to you, and it always has been with Amiga OS and MUI.

If you're not interested in operating systems at all, and consider a computer nothing more than a tool to get work done then you probably won't get anything out of MorphOS that you can't do on a generic PC. But if you're an Amiga enthusiast you owe it to yourself to give it a go and see how good an Amiga OS can be.

Now to explain a little about the configurability of MorphOS, I have taken a few screenshots showing different MUI settings. I didn't change the window frames, but those can be changed as well of course.

The screenshot I showed earlier was how I prefer to have it look, I configured it that way myself. This is the default MorphOS look:

http://i54.tinypic.com/2h50581.png

This is one of the default themes to choose from, for those nostalgic for the past:

http://i54.tinypic.com/200wyea.png

And here it is the way I have configured it to look for myself:

http://i52.tinypic.com/2m85o1x.png

By the way, changing the look of MUI in MorphOS happens in real time. All the programs you are configuring will change their look as you adjust it without having to Test it out first, you can see how it looks as you fine-tune it to your tastes.

[Cammy]

MorphOS has multi-select menus too.

I don't see how MUI makes people put too many buttons in the programs. Do you mean because it's very easy to make GUIs with MUI compared to using Gadtools or Reaction? Sure, it's a lot easier for the programmer, so we can get on with coding the important parts of the program and not have to worry about spending too much time programming the GUI for it. It has been like this since the early 90s when most Amiga programmers started using MUI for their programs, and MUI doesn't have any unnecessary eye candy, that's purely up to the user if they want to make their programs look visually appealing insted of keeping the grey, default look. Even the GUI in OWB is based on IBrowse, other MorphOS software is extremely Amiga-like. And once Zune is updated, Aros software will have the same amount of visual configurability as MUI4 in MorphOS. The main thing missing at the moment is the ability to use bitmap frames rather than the default MUI vector ones.

MorphOS can use regular Amiga icons, GlowIcons, NewIcons or PNG icons and they can be single or dual-state, up to 32bit.