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Default AmigaOS4 Icon Set Revealed

Posted by timothy on from the age-appropriate-and-very-work-safe dept.

Mike Bouma writes "A new screenshot showing OS4's default icon set by Martin 'Mason' Merz has been revealed. Also Q&A session 27 with Amiga's CTO Fleecy Moss is now available. Hyperion, Eyetech, AmigaWorld.net and many more exhibitors will attend the upcoming AmiGBG fair in Sweden." I also like the fantasy Amiga linked to from the Q&A session.

7 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. That's nice, but... by vga_init · · Score: 5, Insightful
    ...where are the machines for me to run it on?

    I'm not making fun of anyone here, and I seriously would like to know; I've always been hearing about Amiga this and Amiga that here on Slashdot every once in a while, and doing a little sniffing around on the web there appears to be a pretty active Amiga community. Also, they're still developing the operating system, so there still must be Amigas, right? Right?

    Well, that's what I was hoping, but after doing some heavy searching on google I haven't been able to turn up a single machine. All of the suspect web sites like Amiga's corporate site and other places don't give any information other than "Contact your local Amiga dealer." Great. Where am I supposed to find one of those? After a little searching about that, nothing good really came up. Most of the sites I found either a) didn't exist anymore or b) didn't really have any Amiga stuff.

    Okay, maybe I am just looking in all of the wrong places, but if somebody could point me out to some good resources then that would be great; I always love to try different and unusual systems, and I'm really interested in this AmigaOS. I just don't have anything to run it on.

  2. Pretty awful. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As someone else pointed out - how very 1990's. These icons are fine for 640x480 in 4-bit color, absolutely useless at 1600x1200 in 32-bit color.

    The problem is that the look and feel of this new Amiga desktop is still based on pixel-by-pixel hand-made artwork. At higher resolutions it leaves the images looking very busy because of the detailed work that lacks anti-aliasing - yet also very bland because of the limited use of color.

    The solution (as chosen by the designers of Windows XP, MacOS and others) - is to use vector artwork as the source. Scalable graphics formats can be rendered to images of any size. No icon should be terribly complicated - but when it's rendered to a small image, vector images gain automatic sub-pixel anti-aliasing and resizing of their smooth color gradients. Both of which are too complicated to do efficiently by hand when working pixel-by-pixel - but they make the final on-screen result look infinitely better.

    1. Re:Pretty awful. by dave_f1m · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Looks fine to me. Did you happen to notice the image *is* 1600x1200 24bit color? And that's what I looked at it on, 1600x1200 24bit color. The icons looked a little large to me, but that's the opposite of what you're claiming. Oops, you say they look busy in 32-bit color. Well, much as I might like to, I can't afford a Parhelia, and that would only get me to 30bit anyway. What video card do you have? Your "solution" doesn't solve any problem you claim it does.

    2. Re:Pretty awful. by notamac · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Small correction... MacOS uses a 128x128 bitmap for icons, and XP uses an even smaller bitmap for its icons... So no vector graphics there :)

  3. Too little too late. by Godeke · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I loved my Amiga. It was capable of doing things that my PC using friends were blown away by. The custom hardware was, in its day, the most advanced on the market for the ordinary consumer.

    That day is past: looking at this desktop I see nothing that different from any other desktop. My love for the Amiga was its ability to crank tracker sound files while doing work. The ability to play games far cooler than any the PC world could generate. The ability to multitask while compiling software.

    Today, even a modest PC with XP home can do all that and more. I'm really not seeing the value that "Amiga" brings to the table. Sure, it brings back memories, but I'm more apt to fire up my emulator to revist some classics than to want a new OS that runs on... what?

    --
    Sig under construction since 1998.
    1. Re:Too little too late. by mdwh2 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      One could make the same point to every Mac and Linux (along with everything else) article.

      Yes, Windows can do what the Amiga did ten years ago, and more (I would hope so!) but I guess some people still prefer alternatives to Windows. There's more to a computer than custom hardware and a quick look at a static screenshot (and even if there wasn't, that wouldn't make Windows automatically better by default!)

  4. No Alpha Transparency? by fozzmeister · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Can't the amiga do alpha transparency (look along the diagonal edges of the icons)? or are these just beta icons?