New improved intuition.library version from the Kickstart 3.1

[wawrzon]

@bszili
+1. finally informed statement about the matter from someone who knows not only aros but os4, mos and genuine amiga from application programming standpoint.

[wawrzon]

@wawrzon:

>im not so much advocating to attract regular customers to aros 68k at this point, but people who care, and are able to contribute in some way.

You seem to be suggesting that there are no regular users left in the community, only programmers. But I think the majority of Amiga users are still non-programmers. Maybe we should have a poll about this.

i am talking to you, among other contributors to this thread, i assume most of whom have some programming experience. in fact its me, who is basically a plain user, occasional but rather incompetent tester and have been trying to make few simple ports to amiga.  i agree that most of the plain users who just sometime play a game do not count much in this case even if they could actually motivate aros68k development if there were any.

>finally informed statement about the matter from someone who knows not only aros but os4, mos and genuine amiga from application programming standpoint.

I've programmed for all these systems, so I believe I qualify...granted that for OS4/AROS there are other users that help with testing etc. Several of my programs are available for AROS x86. The rest would also be available, except for the fact that AROS is missing ReAction. How is software supposed to get ported to AROS when AROS lacks basic functionality that is part of the OS (not even undocumented functionality!) that the application absolutely depends upon? (In the interests of fairness, I should point out that both MOS and OS4 are missing some OS3.9 functionality too, but AROS is missing the most though.)

okay, but in case of aros you even could substitute missing components of the system on which your software relies if you really wanted. you dont have such a possibility on closed source alternatives.

so to exemplify and invert your reasoning, you who blame aros developers for the state of aros, namely not working enough or fast enough for you are actually even more to blame if you dont even contribute. aros developers are the same situation as you, making it in their free time, working on what they have fun working on. neither you nor them are on any duty.

[wawrzon]

It is really an ad-hoc solution and was not designed for extensibility. I.e. it is four colors only (two bitplanes), and no chance to add it with functionalities beyond those originally intended. Ideally, the original icon file should have used some kind of extensible file format, e.g. IFF (ignoring the fact that IFF came actually later.)

For me, the original four color icons always worked "good enough", but arguably, it's really not an up-to-date look.

i must admit, that also for my taste the most inspiring amiga icons were probably all in the genuine icon format. this might not be the reference for good one, but as you see even ms returns to simplistic graphics and its suits them better. i dont ever remember a new- glow- or png- icon to be particularly recognizable nor stunning. im not sure if giving icon designers more options adds up to the overall aesthetics, unique characteristics and ergonomy of the system. sometimes less is more.

[wawrzon]

I don't? Read through this thread again and you will see that I have responded to the comments of various people. Without resorting to ad hominem attacks as you are doing now. I've made this point before, but again: yes you can add extra bits to AROS to get a semi-usable system. That doesn't make it a usable system. Someone could get a bare CPU and add various bits to it to make it a usable system, that doesn't make it a usable system in its own right. You have to download extra bits to make it equivalent to something that already works fine out of the box. What good is that?

Also with AROS x86 you can't even do that; if a piece of software is not available in an AROS x86 version you can't use it at all. Unless they finally have working 68K emulation, which they didn't last time I checked. And like I and others have said before, there's no reason for any 68K user to bother with AROS: it's slow, missing features and ugly. Really, it has next to nothing to recommend it except for copyright issues, which seemed to be the main reason Toni Wilen was bothering with it, because it could be distributed freely with WinUAE, not because it was actually better. The same applies to various BIOS replacements that are included with various emulators. For best compatibility you use an authentic BIOS which, by definition, is 100% byte-for-byte identical. Substitute BIOSes are included for legal reasons only, generally the first thing one does is get an authentic ROM dump.



The main one is that they aren't palette independent. So users have to keep the default colours; if the user changes their palette all their old-style icons will look awful. And if the developer used a non-standard palette to begin with, you have to match your palette to theirs. Not everyone runs MagicWB. MagicWB doesn't even define more than 8 colours IIRC. The original icon format was designed for OS1.x which didn't support deep screens. Even if you assume that neither the developer nor the user has modified the colours from the default, you still can't guarantee what palette is in use. Eg. 1.x has a different default palette as compared to 2.x.

as you yourself rightly observe aros allows to detach amiga scene from parent enterprises who proved to be untrustworthy one after the other. secondly it allows to preserve the code base, which even if thor and olsen claim to have at hand, well i don intend to be rude, but everybody can be hit by bus and then his work will be lost unregarded good intentions. and last but not least it allows to fix and extend functionality, support more different probably cheaper and more economic platforms, therefore allows for variety of choices, which looks like an important issue in an individualistic society. i think its worth it. but its everybodys own choice.