Sigh. What on earth is going on in the proverbial OS4 development labs? It seems like every new release I enjoy less and less. This update feels like a disparate collection of improvements that no one thought to analyze how they worked together usability-wise. Overbearing/bad management may have killed Commodore, but the utter lack of management and lack of an overall vision for the design of OS4 is effectively driving me away - me, a will-be-the-last-Amiga-user-on-Earth kind of guy! What is going on?
Some observations I've made so far:
* No PNG icon support out of the box
There's really no excuse for this. A PNG icon module exists, why is it not bundled? Better yet, why doesn't icon.library support PNGs directly?
* Deprecated tools
IconEdit (still!) doesn't support the 32bit icon format introduced in 4.0
The 2bit Pointer prefs tool doesn't do anything since the default pointer is a 24bit one controlled by the presence/content of a deficon buried in ENVARC:Sys
This will no doubt confuse the hell out of new users. Why haven't these tools been updated?
*Another new icon set
These new icons have been appearing in releases of OWB and other programs for months/years already, and now they're system-wide. Personally, I don't care for them. They're absolutely gigantic, too.
*Inconsistent icon scaling
Fortunately, Workbench prefs now includes an option to set limits on the sizes of icons. It's adjustable to the exact pixel and there are separate scales for the Workbench itself and within drawer windows. Unfortunately, AmiDock is unaffected by the settings. I've had to remove programs from my dock in order to not have it look like a screen real estate monstrosity.
*Nonexistent bitmap scaling
Back in the 4.0 days, gadget images came in several different sizes, each suitable for different screen resolutions. Now there's only one size, so many options in GUI prefs end up having no effect (like attempting to reduce the height of the window titlebar). Scaling for gadgets should be a priority for the next release.
What I've done is created a virtually empty bitmap set - the only things in it are the Amiga key, checkbox, and Boing Ball. Everything else falls back to vector-based gadgets which, though lacking in polish, behave how I expect them to.
*Still no Preview/Test option in GUI prefs
GUI prefs is an absolute mess. There are too many options and it's not clear what they all do. There was a "Preview" button in early releases of 4.0 which said something along the lines of "Not working yet" when pressed. It was cleverly removed in later releases, but the problem of not being able to quickly test what each option does remains.
*Disappointing redesign of ASL requesters
Just as MorphOS has moved to an MUI-based ASL replacement, OS4's is now ReAction-based. Unfortunately, it comes with the expense of the requester not displaying anything until the entire directory has been loaded (older ASL would display files/drawers as they were read from the filesystem in near-real time). The ability to use the RMB to quickly switch to the devices list has also changed (it only works with the third, fourth, or fifth buttons now). It doesn't seem particularly responsive. If you're in the devices list, although pressing the button again will get you back to the directory you were in, nothing changes until the directory has been read. That is, you will continue to see the devices list until your directory is ready to go. The visual feedback is very confusing. I ended up pressing the MMB 3 or 4 times because I thought the click hadn't registered. Instead, the clicks were held in the input buffer so that as soon as the directory was read, it would take me there for a fraction of a second, then back to the devices list, where it would attempt to read the directory in again. Not fun. I may just turn off the feature altogether and use the Volumes button like in OS3.1.
There is a new clickable button in ASL to select All, None, or all files with the same extension as the currently-selected one. That's kind of neat. The devices list also shows multi-assigns in bold (usually entries like FONTS:, HELP:, etc).
*No more WBStartup!
This bothers me most of all. While I understand that the intent was to integrate something like
WBStartup+, the implementation is, frankly, bad. WBStartup+ works by moving everything in your WBStartup drawer into Enabled and Disabled subdirectories. WBStartup+ then becomes the only program in WBStartup and executes everything in Enabled when run.
OS4 has removed the WBStartup drawer entirely. Instead, a new Prefs tool controls a list of programs that will be executed (I guess by LoadWB). Now instead of dragging stuff into a drawer, I have to open up a prefs tool and drag stuff in there (or navigate another ASL requester). It's far less parsimonious. I use T.H.E. to enhance keyboard and menu options in Workbench, but it seems this new WBStartup implementation can't execute scripts. It also seems that manually creating a WBStartup directory doesn't do anything. This is the biggest annoyance I've found so far, so my first priority will be to find a workaround.
That's all for now. Can't wait to have my MorphOS machine back, to be honest.
How is everyone else getting on with the new update?
