OS4.1 photos from ANT

A few photos that show things the official ones don't:

http://www.amigans.net/modules/myalbum/photo.php?lid=163&cid=4
http://www.amigans.net/modules/myalbum/photo.php?lid=164&cid=4
http://www.amigans.net/modules/myalbum/photo.php?lid=165&cid=4
http://www.amigans.net/modules/myalbum/photo.php?lid=166&cid=4

@Chris

Nice Chris, if a little fuzzy

Are you going to write a little report?

@AJS

Sorry about the fuzziness, my camera usually does a good job of focusing on that sort of thing. I blame the fact we were using a CRT monitor, so the picture wasn't great anyway. I also had to resize the photos afterwards to upload them here, which probably didn't help.

Report? Um, I suppose I could do a bit of a summary.

@Chris

I like the icons and headings on the new lister.
Looking good.

The open volume option on the workbench menu looks useful too.

Okay, so it was a sunny Sunday morning as I decided to head of to Enfield to see OS4.1.

(time passes...)

Rigo turned up with his MicroA1 upon which was a newly installed OS4.1.

The first thing we got to see was the new OS4.1 boot screen. An immediate reboot so the Poles could take photos, and we were into OS4.1.

The first obvious difference (apart from the slight change to the default theme) were the transparent inactive windows. The degree of transparency can be modified, and the titlebar of active windows can be made transparent too.

ASL has been rewritten and now uses Reaction. The black background on save requesters has gone (personally I think this is a bad idea, as that gave an important warning that you might accidentally overwrite something, but hopefully some indication will come back in the future), but otherwise it is a good improvement. The style of the text can be customised depending on whether it is a drawer, file or link, exactly the same as you can customise the new WB listviews. I also saw some options to select what actions the third, fourth and even fifth mouse buttons have in the requesters, but didn't click into those. Middle mouse action was set to volumes, fixing the old style guide non-compliant right mouse button for the same. You can also set the background of the rows to alternating colours, in order to make it easier to read across to the information. For some unknown reason this wasn't working however.

Scrollwheel support has been improved and the mouse wheel is now supported directly by Reaction gadgets. Cycle gadgets and listbrowsers can now be navigated with the wheel without the application having to support this itself.

WB has been enhanced. There is a new menu item to display the contents of volumes instead of having to locate them on the WB backdrop (I'm forever trying to find the RAM disk under a mass of windows, so I'm sure I'll find that incredibly useful). WB can now be set to "close windows automatically". When you enter a drawer, usually WB will open the drawer and leave the parent one open, unless you hold down the RAmiga key. This changes the default behaviour so the parent window always closes. I didn't check if the RAmiga key action leaves them open with this enabled, hopefully it does.

The new listviews (list by name etc mode) in WB are particularly good, with options to separate the type and size and show more descriptive types (so instead of either "drawer" or the file size, you get the file size and "library") I assume the extended name comes from DefIcons, or you can turn this off and just get the basic type "tool", "project" etc. The click-sort header can also be switched on and off. A couple of extra options in the Window menu allow you to display .info files and change the sort order.

There is a new "Advanced" button in TimeZone prefs which has some extra options for setting the TZ environmental variable.

And lastly, the swap partition works incredibly well. Create a swap partition and OS4 will automatically see it with no extra configuration required. Rigo copied nearly 400MB of data to the RAM disk (on a 256MB machine) with very little noticeable slowdown - although deleting took considerably longer than it would have done if the data had been in physical RAM. OS4.1 won't page things out until it needs to, and if you don't want to use a swap partition, simply don't create one and OS4.1 will happily run without it.

There were some other things we didn't see, such as the PTP USB drivers (and rumours of scanners in the works), and JXFS which the SLB unfortunately can't boot from so you can't use it on SYS:

Anyway, I left at that point so I don't know what other antics occurred afterwards.

It's not a major upgrade to the OS (but it is 4.1 and not 5.0), but there are a lot of nice features which - for me anyway - make it worth upgrading to.

The difference is probably more like the change from 3.5-3.9 or 2.05-2.1 than 1.3-2.04 or 3.0-3.1.

@Chris

thx for this nice review...

@Chris

More photos from Enfield plus short report (in Polish).

Greetings to all the attendants and to Jacek and his wife who made an effort to be there, took photos and made them available for everybody (mostly on PPA).

@Chris

Looking at the first picture I see many things are updated:

AmigaGuide.library - 18/09/2007 - newer than the one I have (18/12/2006)

AmigaInput - from 12/09/2007 - probably not newer than the version in the classic AmigaOS 4, which may make me purchase AmigaOS 4.0 classic, just for the AmigaInput, instead of waiting for more than 3 months.

asl.library - 04/07/2008 - very new (still hot).
avcodec.library - 30/01/2008 - new one.
bsdsocket.library - 26/08/2007 - probably not newer than in the classic AmigaOS 4 CD.

bullet.library - old.

codesets.library - 17/11/2007 - looks new.

commodities.library - 26/03/2008 - looks updated version.
datatypes.library - 31/03/2007 - looks old, but newer than the one I have.

Picasso96API.library - 23/06/2008 - very new. Probably including all this new features.

All in all looks many libraries are updated than the one I have here.

@Chris

Thanks for the report!

Nice to see every details about the update.

@drHirudo

Without spending a lot of time to go through all the internal rrelease notes for each module in the OS, I couldn't even begin to imagine how many components have been updated since the last public release of OS 4.0, but there are many many bug fixes and enhancements in this latest version. Certainly far too many to list here.

Simon

@Chris

Cheers Chris Nice report,sounds good
and a Thank you to Rigo for putting on the demo pity I couldn't make it

@Chris

Thanks for the report.

Quote:
That's very good !

Quote:
I hope this will change.

Quote:
I was hoping there was a "comment" column in listview mode in WB drawers also (like it exists in ASL requesters).

@drHirudo

Quote:

The thing I want from the OS4 classic release is the fixed picture.datatype. That thing is the source of all my crashes!

It would be nice to see a minor bug-fix update to get AmigaOne OS4 up to the same components as the classic release, before OS4.1 is out.

Quote:

That's a third party library, either it has been adopted, or has been included by mistake. Same with epistula.library I see on the same photo.

Quote:

I completely forgot to look in the Commodities directory. I did notice that ClickToFront was enabled (I was clicking on the depth gadget to bring a window to the front and nothing was happening!) but Rigo may have done that. I forgot to ask. As long as it can be disabled I don't care whether it is default or not. I do know that there will be riots in the streets if it is forced upon people.

Chris

@AJS

Rigo has always been champion at demo-ing Os4. Big Bash couldn't have existed without him.

Things seem like they are looking up. Maybe time to start thinking about a BB5 ?

@Chris

Quote:

What crashes would this be?

@Outcast

Not without new hardware mate. No point. Perhaps you could host an extraordinary 3-cag meeting? i'd come up with my ?A1 and OS4.1 or maybe Rigo would consider it too? who knows.

This would give others from your side of the world a chance to try it.

To everyone else, I plan to have a repeat demonstration of AmigaOS4.1 at the next ANT meeting which is August 9th.

(This is a provisional announcement, and to be confirmed nearer the time - Rigo)

@salass00

There's a bug in the 8-bit colour mapped code which causes the entire system to lock up when you attempt to load images through datatypes that use a 8-bit CLUT.

Sometimes it'll happen on the first picture loaded, other times you can load hundreds, but it will crash eventually.

Anyway, Detlef fixed it about a year and a half ago, but we've not had an update to that file since then.

Same with the printer drivers which have some sort of problem too, making them unuseable for some people.

Chris

@Mikey_C

An impromptu 3CAG would be welcome. I agree on the BB5 matter with regards to HW but I am never-the-less interested in helping out with such an event when the environment becomes more suitable.

Rude!

@Chris,

Thanks for this report and shots.

@Rudei

Acknowledged. I have you and Chris in mind already.