transami wrote:
What is Amiga? Barely even a dream these days --only a few dedicated spirits yet hold tight to her. But it is only a matter of time. The efforts have been great and honorable, but the foolish and greedy have over powered. The last remaining hope it that OS4 is open sourced. Failing that, not even this forum will remain in a few more years. How sad. For nothing was ever more enjoyable than working with my Amiga.
Amiga Owner #51
Wow, what pessimism.
OS 4 is an easy-to-understand, lightweight, compact OS. It has a legacy application base that is upwardly-compatible for the most part.
Y'know what? I work with UNIX and Windows all day at work. Neither are easy to understand. Only getting more complicated as time goes on. It's like a breath of fresh air looking at OS4 again.
To me OS4's biggest challenges are:
a) Continuous memory handling improvements
- protected memory
- de-fragmentation strategies
- intelligent VM support
b) Consistent UI model
- at the moment we have Reaction, Gadtools,
MUI, ClassAct etc... BAD, BAD, BAD
- my pet peeve is "Ok" vs "OK" in requesters.
It's "OK" da**it!
c) New cleaner APIs for graphics, audio
- these are coming for OS4.x, apparently
d) More POSIX support - enables easier porting of
open-source apps from other platforms (ie Linux)
This is all from a developer's point of view. Note that I have not developed any applications for OS4. I do have an old copy of the latest SAS/C in storage somewhere but that's about it.
Give this OS a chance. We're back at the A1000 days again. Once we get to 4.1/4.2 and an A500 equivalent comes along things will start rocking again.
I expect someone will come up with an integrated motherboard with a low-end G3, very similar to the uA1-I but in a more cost-reduced form. Perhaps the next generation of Articia chips will help this along.
That's my 2c for now...
Cheers.
