Simple wishlist for next AmigaOS

@vox
#52--... about 23 points what users would like to have.
Nah, just one...
If we had a better Amiga business management system maybe the wish list wouldn't exist, huh? So, that my first wish: Amiga officials, please find your brains! Gee, it sounds like I'm a troll, but I'm not. I'm just critical and dubious about the 'next' Amiga.

@Snuffy

You seem to be under the impression there is a plethora of users sitting on the side-lines just waiting to be a part of this community...

In reality, this just isn't the case. We are all reliant on a company that has invested a significant amount of money and resources in doing what they feel is best for the AmigaOS4 users. Be that right or wrong in your book is neither here nor there, the idea is to bring a product to market which suits the needs of the majority.

Business management is all about being able to judge your market, and any business in the Amiga community is going to be have to try and second-guess a market which is about as stable as a volatile volcano.

History shows us that there have always been a very limited number of companies involved in the Amiga market, and the reason is possibly because that it is a gamble from an investors point of view.

In all honesty, the only real thing that has changed between now and 10 years ago, is that there are significantly less consumers to buy product, hence there are less businesses trying to sell product.

There are many ways in which the "users" can help in this situation. One is to be productive, and another is be a customer. Being English, I know how much people love to moan, and I'll be ahead of the queue when I need to be, but there are some times when it simply doesn't help.

We are all here for one reason: we all love the Amiga computer, and enjoy using it. Once that stops becoming fun, it's time to move on. There are other websites out there that are full of "Amiga users" that stopped finding it fun years ago, although why they still hang around is anyones guess. Personally, if I found a hobby as painfull as a full-body wax, I think I would find a new hobby, but it seems peoples mileage varies.

Ho hum.

Simon

@LiveForIt

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Actually if you're just using it for filetype identification on a general level, whether datatypes.library has a superclass for the filetype is irrelevant (superclasses can be added anyway).

The only bit of information needed is the unique file type name. This is the descriptive text that the descriptors themselves are named. There is another id - the base name - that identifies which datatype subclass handles the file. This is not necessarily unique and should not be present for "dummy" descriptors used for filetyping only.

Once you have the unique filetype name it can be used the same as one passed from DefIcons.

This isn't new - there was a icon.library global id hook written for OS3.5 which used datatypes.library. The only things which concern me are the mess which might result in devs:datatypes, and that having hundreds of descriptors might have a performance impact, but those aren't insurmountable.

@vox

One more thing I like to see is some kind of dual monitor support.

Seeing workbench on two screens, moving the mouse from one screen to the other you know how it works on windows.

@Chris

I don't know how the descriptors work so I can't really say if that good or bad idea, at least it has to be easy to manage when you install or uninstall applications or upgrade your system.

I guess all descriptors can be put in one file so it can bulk loaded, that's a lot faster, and simple description of a file should not be too large, maybe it should be keep in ram so one can quick query the file database, or at least kept as long as your actively browsing directories lets say until a time out.

What I want are bugfixes first so here we go:

1. DVI must work with my P2350 Samsung screen! Thankfully it got VGA too but that's not good enough.

2. For some reason some disk operations taks all CPU! Yes DMA settings are fine. This shows with Netsurf when downloading, it shows with DOpus 4 when deleting files amongst other things. Everything gets really slow. Deleting from workbench/shell are no problem, works like a dream but whatever the differences are it's a pain in the ass to not being able to use DOpus 4 because of this (yes I got the latest beta and I've complained about it at amigaworld, listing the whole harddrive configuration and I've set it up correctly with DMA on every disk).

Allright! So when these things are sorted I will have a basic working AmigaOne. Thankfully there are workarounds now so I use workbench or shell for diskoperations and unarch to unarchive files because it's so much faster and works like it should do, no 100% CPU usage making you wait forever!

Sorry I just had to... again...

3. So! Flash are important for day to day usage. Lots of people wants to use Youtube but HTML 5 might be an answer there. Still some pages depends on Flash and there are even some nice games using flash so that's needed.

4. Java......... I need it for one thing only, one site that uses Java for some online games. It isn't a must have at all but I think that the plattform needs it. You got it with windows, mac os x and linux so it should really exist for amigaos as well.


5. THEN we get to new features for amigaos. Memory protection is important! Yes AmigaOS is pretty stable but some applications can bring it down and rebooting is boring. Tried lots of SDL-games yesterday and some of the really old ones did crash. Reboot, try, reboot, try etc...

6. Support for multiple cores.

7. Something needs to be done about the prefs, it's confusing. I need to state that it isn't confusing for me as an old amiga user but I think that it might be confusing for new users.

8. Printing are rather important, no it's very important! It's just silly that you can't print! From a programing point of view it isn't silly at all and something tells me to shut the f*** up but still... you are browsing and see something that you would like to print... what to do? Yes, switch to another computer! That sucks, as simple as that!

9. Also there's something about the whole look about AOS 4.1 that I don't like. 4.0 had that happy feeling to it and it somehow disapeared with 4.1. I love the new icons though. Something's not right though and it's hard to tell what's wrong. It's something a bit dark and sad about the whold AOS 4.1 upd 2 theme. Cloudy background (yes it's changed) but also the rest of the theme... Actually Windows 7 got this right this time. A clear blue background with clear and colourfull icons. Makes me happy. MacOS X got a pretty darkgray colour in the GUI and doesn't look to bright either. AmigaOS should make you feel happy, that's important and it's not the feeling that I get when I see Workbench. It feels a little like som Linux distro. Does Linux make you happy and feel like you're home?

Something needs to change about the look...

I think I'm done now :P

EDIT: 10. How could I forget? It needs to be able to run old games/software! I'm using RunInUAE which I love but some solution should be included with the OS I think. Isn't it a good way to let old and new users have access to some fun right away with their new computer? I'm not sure what solution would be the best though but since there are solutions available, why not? Or maybe put something like some of the best games/demos of old ready to be run from the CD in the contributions drawer? It isn't meant to be something that people should enjoy instead of modern games/demos but more like a nod to the past. If handled correctly I think it could be a good thing. Winblows includes a few games since forever so why not? It's proofed to be a wining concept and I would actually prefer some of the old amiga games over some cardgames. A remake of alien breed 3D would be cooler but who would make that and release it for free? Anyway, the possibility to launch 50 of the coolest games in a window on workbench would be good fun. Launch it from CD and if you like it you can install it. Haha, I really like this idea .

EDIT2: 11. It's important to me to able to use HDMI on the graphics card.

EDIT3: Part of the boring look might be because of the darker screen when using vga instead of dvi. I think it makes a difference

EDIT4: OpenGL needs to be improved.

@hotrod

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funny how taste and impressions can vary!

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we agree on that!

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Maybe you can revert to the 4.0 theme in "SYS:Prefs/Presets/Default/#? OS4.0 Look" ?

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It depends on the theme.. It's not like "home" but Debian or Ubuntu's default theme let me feel like on the couch at a good friend's place..


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me too..

@vox

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Java and Flash can get left out, these aren't important (and I say that as a Java programmer).

OpenGL improvements are a must. OpenGL 4 support is probably a bit much to ask I guess. OpenCL would also be handy, as well as something like Apple's simple multi-threading APIs using Objective C 'blocks'.

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This is a good idea, although OOo or OOofK is probably a very long way off.

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Surely they will just do more work on ReAction. Speaking of which, are they thinking of creating a multitouch interface - "Touch ReAction" is a nice brand.

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I think support of popular AllInOne printers would be nice.

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I guess these could be ported with some effort from Linux, but they would be nice to have. Also Mac file system support, as a lot of Amiga users migrated to Macs.

@Amigo1

Well, the OS 4.0 theme doesn't look like OS 4.0 so that's a problem .

Really, load up AOS 4.0 update 4 and compare. The whole feeling about that release was amazing, I don't get that with 4.1, not at all.

I'm only sharing my opinion if it's worth anything. If it's not just ignore it :P . I want AOS to be a happy place like it used to be and for that to be possible it has to feel right (no hardware issues) and it has to look right (make you feel happy about the way it looks).

@hotrod

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Whilst it does sound like you have an actual problem there, I will point out that NetSurf's downloading routine is a little CPU heavy, so that isn't a good benchmark for disk CPU usage.

@Hatting

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Yep, i agree there too. But still, if we will have it, it will be better than if not have :) Some flash games and java apps are good today.


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The next opengl realisation on aos4 will be MESA+Gallium3d => we can expect any modern features set (include ogl2/3/4, all that shaders stuff and such).

@Chris

Since I don't have my a4k runing I can't really check Netsurfs behavement with AOS 3.9 but I know that DOpus 4 hasn't felt as slow ever on any hardware that I've gotten (old Commodore Amigas) as it does now so something isn't right.

Regarding downloading using a browser, I launch IBrowser for that since it doesn't use 100% of the CPU and got more information than Netsurf. What's more important is that download is faster when using IBrowse and I suspect that it's related to the whole issue.

@hotrod

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Checked dopus4 right now on my peg2/1ghz/aos4.1u2 : coping, or deleting of files does not matter of how long and of which size: 20-30% of cpu loading for SFS2, and about 30-40% of cpu loading for JFS.

@hotrod

Have you tried SilverGreen theme from Prefs/Presets ?

@kas1e

That is how it should be and for some reason it isn't like that on my machine. If you could see it you would understand, it takes forever deleting lots of small files (for exampel) compared to doing it in workbench. The mouse pointer jumps around and the GUI updates slowly. All feels very sluggish.

Btw, one more wish : Its prefs for the choice/test/save theme. I mean nice simply gui window called "theme manager" or kind. Not like it for now. Maybe even port from AROS will be fine (but it will be mui3 then, not reaction).

@hotrod
Imho the best solution in such problems, its just hook up new-clean HDD, and install everything from scratch (aos4.1u2): SFS2 for system: , and JFS for all others.

@kas1e

Yeah I've done that.

@hotrod

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Yeah, the combination of your problem and NetSurf's high downloading CPU usage probably makes everything grind to a halt.

Here if NetSurf is downloading in the background, other things are a little slower but barely noticeable. I'm not sure I can do much to reduce that, because of how it all links up, anything I do will affect other areas of the browser.

(oh, and somebody was working on a more advanced download manager, not sure what's happening with that)

@Chris

I don't believe that it's something that you should do, it seems to be more of a driver issue. I don't blame Netsurf or DOpus for this. As I think you know by now I *really* like Netsurf for AOS .

@TSK

The point that I'm trying to make is that it's important with a good first impression. Yes I've played around with themes and some are very nice.

Oh well, it's just AOS 4.1 so I guess that the look will have more changes for the later versions.