Top 3 best ideas in amiga history?

[runequester]

And to have a positive counterpoint to the other thread.. what do you think were the 3 best ideas in the history of the amiga?

Again, focus on hardware / software during the commodore era

[Karlos]

Datatypes were a very cool idea. The only issue has really been with their implementation. Ideally, they should have been fully bidirectional and support streamed decoding for video/audio.

[AeroMan]

Draggable screens.... Oh man, how I miss them

[hooligan]

I fell in love with MUI since the beginning.

[Vulture]

1. Right mouse button menus
2. Draggable screens
3. HAM modes

[Ancalimon]

1. best idea: Mouse pointer didn't move sluggishly on the screen. It was like the pointer belonged there. It was fun just to see the pointer moving on the screen smoothly.

2. best idea: Workbench. It was not what it should have been. AmigaOS3.9 or AmigaOS4 look with Dopus Magellan functionality should have been standard on AmigaOS3.1. Still it was so good that even today, it's fun and productive to use Workbench3.1 with several utilities to make it better.

3. best idea: Video Toaster and Flyer. It's a shame they sold it for too much money (as if an A4000 was cheap)(I know VT+Flyer was still much cheaper than professinal equipment but still, Amiga WAS a home computer.) and there was no PAL version.

[ElPolloDiabl]

1. The Icon Editor
2. Startup-sequence
3. Crossdos/Crossmac

[Karlos]

Other good ideas:

BOOPSI: Implementing a runtime extensible OOP user interface system in C/Asm was not a trivial task. Although the system looks somewhat unusual and dispatch is less efficient than, say, a C call through a function pointer, method call in C++ or Objective C, it was still an elegant solution to the problem.

Commodities Broker System. Always liked this idea, a "chain of responsibility" (to use design pattern parlance) mechanism for dealing with input events and allowing applications to monitor them without having to have focus.

[redrumloa]

Best hardware? Probably the A500 itself. It was still revolutionary, compact and most importantly had a lower price. Software? Draggable screens in multiple resolutions. I still don't know any video card that can do it.

[Karlos]

I still don't know any video card that can do it.

In theory, any compositing system can do it. Different resolution resolution screens as texture surfaces can be scaled directly in hardware to match the current display resolution.

[Daedalus]

Yup, it can be done with compositing, but strictly speaking it's not quite the same thing. The video chip actually ran at a different pixel clock on different scanlines on the old way, whereas the compositing way means the whole screen is one resolution, with the second resolution scaled up or down. In fairness, the compositing is more suited to modern monitors - not sure too many LCDs will like having different frequencies introduced halfway down the screen...

[pampers]

Booting with no s-s.

[Karlos]

Yup, it can be done with compositing, but strictly speaking it's not quite the same thing. The video chip actually ran at a different pixel clock on different scanlines on the old way, whereas the compositing way means the whole screen is one resolution, with the second resolution scaled up or down. In fairness, the compositing is more suited to modern monitors - not sure too many LCDs will like having different frequencies introduced halfway down the screen...

Actually, that's not entirely true. The screen behind was "mode promoted" to whatever the front screen was running at. If you partially revealed a 31kHz mode behind a 15kHz one, the rear screen would appear stretched on the display until it was brought to the front. Only one scanrate was used for the entire display at any one time. Trying to change rate mid-frame would not do a CRT any good at all.

[AeroMan]

Actually, that's not entirely true. The screen behind was "mode promoted" to whatever the front screen was running at. If you partially revealed a 31kHz mode behind a 15kHz one, the rear screen would appear stretched on the display until it was brought to the front. Only one scanrate was used for the entire display at any one time. Trying to change rate mid-frame would not do a CRT any good at all.

That´s true only in 31kHz. If you are using a 1084 for example, and you have a hires and a lores mode they are running at different pixel clocks. As long as you keep the sync signal at the same rate, you can change resolution without promoting modes

[Ilwrath]

Two I can't believe aren't mentioned yet;

ReTargettable Graphics/Audio : Sure, in most OS now you can pick a full screen resolution for a game.  Of course, the Amiga did it first, and took it further, also allowing you to pick which video card you use, and which rendering mode, and also being able to choose differing sound cards.

ARexx : A single scripting language that allows you to create interactions between any major software packages you happen to have.  If only modern PC, Mac or Linux applications got along this well, think of what we could do.......