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Concept Screenshots Of The AmigaDE GUI
Mike Bouma writes: "Check out this posting by Amiga`s CTO on the AmigaOne Mailing list. It includes some concept pictures of a GUI for the Amiga Digital Environment, which is being targetted at AmigaDE enabled handheld devices like Sharp`s upcoming Zaurus PDA. Some of the younger Slashdot readers may not be familiar with the classic AmigaOS, however interested people can (re)discover the AmigaOS through emulation, I suggest to check out this easy to setup "Amiga in a box" package."
you can see more pictures of the new GUI on: http://www.aug99.com/exclusiv/guiamigaos.html
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Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Nasa uses OLD, OLD, OLD technology because they know EXACTLY how it works.
You will NEVER see a Pentium 4 on the space shuttle, unless it belongs to Dennis Tito.
--
Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Sure, some people would say that statement is crap, but then they said the same thing about the Internet. Companies are trying to make educated guesses on where everything is going. Right now, the embedded market is wide open and full of opportunity--and if it pans out, companies can win big. Of course, it could all get flushed down the tubes like NCs ;-) But remember that consumer devices/embeded devices are all the rage outside the US--especially in Japan.
Why fight MS on the PC if the PC is going to be a marginal market at best? That's what these companies are thinking.
I for one, agree. I don't think MS is stupid (i.e. they won't let it catch them off guard like the Internet did), but it will be a good market full of great opportunities. If you are just starting out and looking for a technology wave to jumpstart your career, my advice (which makes me in no way responsible for your life or your own stupidity) is to get cracking on the Palm SDK and churn out some apps. Proving you have skills will get you in early. This is from someone who successfull got on the Internet Gravy Train :-)
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
Let's see... there are:
The idea of writing a whole new OS, unless something new, some new itch has been found that just needs to be scratched, seems somehow crazy.
(Now, the SIMTICS idea that I'm working on is at least half-way sane. I'm merging two existing concepts to produce something that is - in theory - better than either could be, alone. I'm still not writing a "new" OS, though. There's no delving into re-inventing the wheel. The wheels I can use are already more than sufficient for any need I may have.)
Worse, the idea of exploiting the name of a very good system (for the time) in an effort to promote this new product is marketting abuse at its very worst.
(Now, if they were to derive some/all of their concepts from the original Amiga, or follow the Amiga philosophy in some significant way, then it could be justified. I've seen nothing to suggest that.)
As far as I can tell, this is a *One company that will happily seduce the populace, before collapsing under mysterious circumstances.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The hand-holding-disk was indeed the prompt to insert the Workbench disk (or another bootable disk) in AmigaOS 1.2 and 1.3. (Later versions had an animated disk beside the checkmark logo.) The original Amiga (later named the Amiga 1000) loaded the OS kernel from the Kickstart disk at power-on, and the prompt to insert that was a 'doodle-oot' noise.
This is what every Amiga advocate used to say - because multi-tasking was just about the only thing the AmigaOS had going for it to start off with, along with a reasonable (but slow) file-system. For a long time it was horribly buggy, and it had a hideous and inconsistent UI. I was once Amiga advocate, but I doubt I would have been if I hadn't started out with OS 2.0.
Windows NT and all versions of Windows from Windows 95 onwards most certainly have real multi-tasking and multi-threading. On Windows 95 this can be crippled by Win16 apps, some of which were part of the OS distribution, but I don't believe that's true of later versions. So I think you're going on out of date information.
What's up with this sudden drive for all ailing OS companies to write OSes for palm-like devices? Be had a great OS that they seem to have basically abandoned for BeIA, and Amiga is going embeded too. Do they think they have a better chance against PalmOS and Wince? I would much rather leave my PDA running PalmOS and let the other companies work on their mighty-cool bigger OSes. Unfortunately, I guess we are still stuck with the stuff from Micros~1 even though there are much cooler things out there...
(as a side note, I do believe that BeOS is the coolest desktop OS I have ever used. On the other hand, I havn't played with Mac OSX (and its NeXT core) much yet, so that possbily could change. Probably not though...)
Posted from the wireless couch.
The Amiga platform is dead for commercial applications, the brand name has changed hands many times because it's still being associated with "cool technology" and some people thought they could exploit that for marketing purposes.
It's really sad to see the disappointment of old Amiga freaks when they see announcements about something new related to Amiga, only to find out that it's just a marketing gag or whatever.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Other than Amiga colors and the boing ball, what does it have in common with the classic Amiga?
Myself I perfered MagicWB and Magic User Interface on my Amiga, I cant even use UAE without it...f s.jpeg
http://www.sasg.com
Some examples for the click impatient
MUI - http://www.sasg.com/mui/preview.gif
MWB - http://www.sasg.com/pic/mwb_preview.gif
Gallery pics - http://www.sasg.com/mui/gallery/Stefan_Stuntz/Pre
Did the original Amiga GUI have curves like that?
Nope, never, not even close. This has very little in common with Amiga of the past. The original Amiga ruled because it had an operating system that was suppported with several specialized IC's that would augment the OS. These new devices have no such hardware. I'm not 100% sure that the hardware is neccessary anymore (one was a graphics processor, one was a sound processor, &c) but that makes me wonder just how relevant Amiga OS is any more.
Makes me believe that they are just playing the nostalgia and pseudo-nostalgia card as a marketing ploy.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Several major companies, including Disney, still use Amigas regularly to create effects.
No they don't. See, I can match you one for one with worthless anecdotes, let's try it again:
Almost every TV station in the world uses Amigas.
Nope, wrong-o. Lemme try something new: this time I get to make up the "phacts".
The last TV station to use an Amiga switched over to an Avid 4 years ago.
Hey, I see why you do that, it was SOOOO easy!
Now for some good 'ol derision of your "phun phacts":
NASA has been known to use Amigas and claim that Amigas are (still) the most versatile machines around.
Yeah, they use them for doorstops and as reaction mass for extra-atmospheric maneuvering. I think that Mars probe that smashed into the surface was powered by an Amiga reaction mass engine. Apparently they don't even function well in that capacity...
;P
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Allright..There's something i've been meaning to ask here. The biggest question that haunts the whole Amiga picture is: why bother
For the late 80's/early 90's, nobody disputes that the Amiga was king of the hill when it came to multimedia apps. But by today's standards, its really nothing to bark about. With every Amiga, you got 22 Khz stereo sound (about half the sample quality of a $5 audio card you can buy for any PC these days), and an 8-bit display capable of resolutions considered low-to-average in today's PC market, looking past graphics mode hacks unsuitable for GUIs like HAM. 24-bit displays on Amiga systems are basically RTG kludges that sit ontop of an already overburdoned planar display. Again, in terms of capability and performance, it's beaten by even the lowest of low-end video cards for PCs.
Next virtue...Small footprint. Sure, you can boot the OS off a single floppy, and it has a remarkably small footprint for an OS with those sorts of capabilities... But so what, so does Linux, so does QNX and others. Why bother with the Amiga?
When I was younger, I never thought i'd see the day when the Amiga's capabilities were surpassed by a platform as braindead as the PC, but it's happened, and happened a long time ago. I owned one for like 9 years, and I agree, it was a good machine..I just don't see the reason why anyone should really bother with AmigaOS other than pure religious zealotry or novelty.
Bowie J. Poag
The Amiga DE has little in common with the original AmigaOS besides the name - although the DE is pretty cool in itself -based on the Tao virtual machine architecture.
Intersting that you should mention PalmOS - the old AmigaOS is being Open-source cloned by the aros project, and, it's recently beern ported to Palm hardware - if anything, the old amigaos, let alone the new DE, is better for palmtops than Palmos (which is quite limited - no preemptive multitasking, dodgy shared libraries, yadda, yadda) - then again, EPOC32 is better than either...
Choice of masters is not freedom.
Granted that the Amiga hardware was pretty impressive for it's time (the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale was still using one for titles and cuts in its video production stidio in 1996).
And the OS was also very well suited to the platform at that time too. I just don't see how pulling out an old OS and stuffing it on a palmtop can be a good thing. Surely there is another OS more suited for this use? PalmOS, mayhaps?
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DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Some of the younger Slashdot readers may not be familiar with the classic AmigaOS, however interested people can (re)discover the AmigaOS through emulation
Or, if you don't have time, just stand next to an Amiga user for 6 or 7 seconds.
I shouldn't complain, actually. As a Mac user, Amiga folk serve an important purpose - making me look almost normal.
<CrotchetyOldMan>Whyyyyy, you young whippersnapper... back in the day, we had to put in a KICKSTART disk and wait - oh, we'd wait and wait and wait - you damned kids think you're so PUT OFF when you have to put in a WORKBENCH disk... whyyyyy, we used ta dream of puttin' a 256k expansion up front, and here you are with your 512k and 1 meg systems, ooooooh... go get me a 1020 to beat you with...!</CrotchetyOldMan>
Why are all of the interface designers seeming to go to this sort of "plastic on acid" look for everything. I just installed WindowsXP on a laptop, and the first thing that I thought was the it looked like a first graders toy. All of the buttons were huge, shiny and colorfull. Mac OSX looks like a fourth graders frickin lunchbox, and KDE2 (a little better) still feels toyish.
This latest trend of making all of the icons (icons are useless wastes of desktop real estate as it is) look like plastic anime jewels is really sickening. Dont get me wrong GUI's are nice, but they don't need to make you feel and look like a retard for using them. IMVHO this is why window managers like enlightenment and DM's like Gnome will eventually be the future of GUI's, once the masses realize that a 100x100 close window button is not really nessecary, and in fact a really bad idea.
Who ever hires the designers that make interfaces like the ones shown in star trek (lcars) or the one in Swordfish will make the big bucks. Yes I realize that those interfaces are completely fictional and dont really do anything, but the theory behind them, especially lcars, is very good. The world where the application and the desktop integrate seamlessly is the world of the future (not even windows can do that, even with IE).
Just my $0.02.
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
I just want video toaster back so I can have kiki again. I haven't seen her since high school
Is it just me or does this little write up seem totally contradictory to what we last heard from Amiga?
I mean, first they are working on a hardware independent, OS independent "Environment" called DE, THEN they are reverting back to pushing forth development of AmigaDOS 4.0 as a whole stand alone system because as they said "That's what Amigans wanted". NOW they are showing us ugly little pictures of this Digital Environment that nobody wanted, as if they've forgotten the promises they've made.
Let me set one thing straight as a one time owner of 3 Amigas (1200/2000/4000)...
We don't WANT Amiga DE.
We don't WANT a new, unrelated hardware with the Amiga name slapped on it.
We WANT AmigaDOS 4.0 ported to modern hardware with a good mix of legacy software support and modern OS features.
If you don't WANT to give this to us, curl up and DIE already, it's long past overdue!
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Looks more like a GNOME panel to me. Now, how long do we have to wait for gtk and Sawfish themes! :)
Gorkman
You are wrong for many different reasons. If Amiga is dead, then how could I have cut a commercial with one yesterday? If its dead then how come my work has two, my school has one, and the local university has a whole lab of them. Amiga is dying, no doubt about it. But the video toaster and flyer were/are such incredible products that they have prolonged amiga's death for ages. Is anyone buying Amiga's? I hope not, that would be pretty silly, but Amiga is not dead, it is just taking a long time to kick off because of the video toaster and flyer. Now that they have come to NT and have been there for a while, people are starting to migrate over when they have the money.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
I tried out the palm-top version of the AmigaOS a few days ago, only to be frustrated at boot time by a chunky, low-res image of a hand holding a Workbench floppy disk. Palmtops don't have floppy drives!! Until this is fixed, I don't see much future for AmigaOS on hand held platforms.
Some of my concerns are that, if GUIs are more than just a personal preference based on past experiences, why are succesive desktop environments from the same vendor so different? or If GUIs are building on computer-human interactions, then why do they often dumb-down the new GUI so people familiar with past versions can use it?
In short, are these screens developed by a graphic designer, and then programed by a techie, or are they based on some research that might make Amiga easier to use rather then just look better?
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
.. although marketting will be part of it.
:-)
The "New" Amiga ideology is to have a 'Digital Environment' which can be either be hosted on another OS (Palm OS, Sharp's TaurusOS, Windows, Linux, etc, etc), or run on their own native hardware (due RSN). Couple this and the write-once-run-anywhere abilities of their core programming languages, and you have an amazingly powerful system for emersing yourself in digital media and content, which is where the industry is moving.
And yes, you'll still have a command line interface if you want it
Several major companies, including Disney, still use Amigas regularly to create effects. Almost every TV station in the world uses Amigas. Some of the top serials on TV use Amigas to produce their work. NASA has been known to use Amigas and claim that Amigas are (still) the most versatile machines around. Modern languages such as Python and E have been ported. AmiNet has the largest collection of free software on the internet. Nope, even if the Amiga was a horsey it would be alive and running.
Cedric Balthazar Rotherwood
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform +
System Admin. for Solaris
Its even complete with a horizontal seperator, little arrows for running apps, and a Mail Icon that shows how much unread mail you have.
Burn Hollywood Burn
As history has proven if software(OS) confines itself to a particulary device(PDA), the development of that platform is based on the demand of the device. And in a market as saturated and funded had handhelds, I doubt the Amiga OS will become the superstar without multiple(more than 2) device vendors(successful). To bad though, I would have liked to see it suceed.
"Get them before they get....
I am not an amiga user and don't know if I every will be...
/. has an article about amiga is that helpful to anyone. (not to mention quite boring)
But I don't think that lampooning amigans with "It's dead let it go" everytime
They aren't saying that we all have to run out and buy an amiga now. It's just an interesting news item about an alternative OS... what's so wrong with that? if your not interested then don't worry about it, if you are then it's nice to get some up to date information on it.
I personally think it looks interesting, I don't know if it'll take off, but I think it could work if given a chance.