Some info leaked from AmiWest

I was reading this show report, and came across some info that should please quite a few people (including me!) . Look at the two pictures here and here.

The first appears to show that (finally!) OS4's Workbench will be able to scale pictures without stretching them badly (which for example currently causes circles to appear as ellipses & people to look fat or squashed).

The second appears to show that Workbench will be getting integrated picture previews (thumbnails).


There was also some sneak peeks at the new Shell replacement (with scrollbar, tabs, etc). Hopefully this means we can finally wave goodbye to installing KingCON in the next release of OS4.

@ChrisH

I really would like to see a picture with the new shell in action.... for example, what are on the right mouse button menu of the newshell.

Hope that will look like a look kingCON and even more...

yes, I'm curious....

@ChrisH
Yep, pretty interesting. But from my point of view (just an imho), better to integrate current version of Filer to os (because Filer for example have already thumb priview). Maybe not the fastest priviews (for example on mos/ambient thumbs generated faster in 2-3 times in compare with filer routines), but that area can be reworked by core-team and alt.

What for now i really miss from WB : buttons at top of every window, with al those root/back/forward/etc (i.e. like in Filer now), to make it really usable (i mean to make WB really usable). Because its really annoing to open all the time those windowses again and again even if you want just "go up at once".

Plus something really wrong with "view by name" mode in WB, its slow like hell (in Filer its uber-fast). Maybe it because of thums generation, dunno, but when i choice "view by name" on my work partition, and trying go to it, then i wait seconds for first time (with busy-pointer), but imho will be cool to have it also asynchronic as in Filer (one more plus for Filer integration). If i noticed right, when you choice "show as icons", then it works asynchronic.

Integration of Filer and cooperation to works on it not only by Orgin, but also by core-team, will give really usable Desktop in end 100%.

@ChrisH

good find!..hopefully a pre-Christmas update is in the making

and (knowing I repeat myself a lot with this) let's hope the next update includes usb 2.0 support :)

@ChrisH
The X1000 and the Sam460ex were both running beta flavours of AmigaOS 4.1 with all sorts of features enabled which have not shipped yet.

I suppose you could say it was a "leak" but if we really wanted to keep it all secret the boxes wouldn't have been running a beta versions. Nice to see some people were paying attention.

Underneath, the OS has been improved as well but those changes are always much more difficult to visualize like the USB 2.0 support.

@ssolie

So, does this mean that there IS usb 2.0 support under the hood (fingers crossed)?

@Vulture

With USB 2.0 but no fixed CrashDOSfilesystem we can crash out memory sticks 45 times faster, yay!

@kas1e

Thanks for the tip on Filer, picture previews are useful sometimes but don't really like having Easter running as it slows things down sometimes when previews not really needed.

@ChrisH

Some welcome additions, especially the aspect ratio/scaling options in WBPattern - long overdue! I do feel some prefs programs need integrating to make it easier to find things/more logical, e.g. into GUI prefs along with Palette and Pointer. With the resulting prefs program given a more user friendly name like 'Appearance' or 'Look' perhaps.

Wonder if MultiView will get any scaling options? I find it pretty useless when working with multi megapixel digital camera shots.

Previewing options looking good too, hopefully it won't slow down Workbench too much.

@Vulture

I SUPPOSE that this presented small toys will be in 460 version of OS 4.1 and if some of the big things make it. Up to Christhmas, I expect 4.1.3 update for all (why not Boing Bag?)

@Deniil

lol
still usb 2.0 is a must.

@ChrisH

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Mega cool!!!

@Daniel

Try PrefsCenter on os4depot.net

@Amigo1

I have tried and is quite nice and demonstartes a possible solution, although reminds of Windows Control Panel a bit.

I don't think there's anything wrong with the existing AmigaOS approach to preferences with the seperate prefs programs in a drawer as has existed since the 80s, it just could use a tidy up and some 'consolidation' now that many bits have been added/updated over the years.

Personally I don't think the right approach is to put an additional 'layer' over the top of the existing system. IMHO it's not the right direction if you want to keep the OS from become bloated and have a small footprint, well organised and logical OS. The preferences programs themselves need to be fixed/reorganised to make them easier to use and more relevant to today.

@kas1e

Maybe OS devs could add WB drawer plugin system so anybody could change WB drawers with installable plugins in anyway you want.

Also why not move functionality of AsyncWB and RAWBInfo into WB itself and make them even better.

Have you tried YetAnotherDesk ?

@Deniil

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Hum, I'm an expert for that

BTW, this is the thing that afraid me the most

I really would like to see TonyW explain what happened to FAT32 improvements (hope some more has been made since my last thread about this subject).

@ChrisH

I look forward to learning more about that shell replacement. I LOVE Konsole in KDE, this sounds similar to that.

@TSK

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Yeah ! But from other side, what else we want from drawer except of topbar menu + settings (which wb already have) ? If there will be integration of Filer, then, top-bar also can be configurable as you want. If i remember right, you can put all that buttons not only at top, but at bottom as well..

Have any ideas of wb-drawer-plugins, which can help to expand usability ?

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Indeed . But i think its the same question as about reorganize a "prefs" for more logical way. I think developers will do something like this soon.

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Yep :) I even do few comments to you on os4depot about. It was interesting for use, but something was wrong with shell-launching from menu (crashes). But that desktop looks interesting for sure :) Have you any progress on this lately ?

@Daniel
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Good that it configurable in Filer (on/off). But i personally all the time use Flat mode only, because its fast and nice :) All that previews/thumbs and so on are slow anyway (not _that_ slow, but not fast, not immediately in other words, flat mode rokz:) ).

@Deniil

Better have a corrupted filesystem in 45 seconds then corrupted after some hours :)