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Default AmigaOS4 Icon Set Revealed
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.
"A new screenshot showing OS4's default icon set by Martin 'Mason' Merz has been revealed."
A small handful of people rejoice!!
"Derp de derp."
...nevermind.
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
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.
Wow, those Amiga OS 4 icons just scream "Welcome to 1995."
Checked Yahoo Shopping and found this:
s /? item=103
http://www.forefronttechnologiesinc.com/Product
$1200 for an 800mhz G4 Amiga system.
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.
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.
Then you get the Fonts.
Then you get the vaporware of the year award.
The AmigaOS4 Pre-Release/SDK will be available to all AmigaOne owners and is currently undergoing final beta-testing.
Graphically, the icons kinda suck, but they are quite clear, a bit like KDE's, which is more than can be said for the "grayish gradient wash" approach of GNOME or the "ooh, see through" MacOSX.
They're very 90s "newicons" amigaish, which is a look I always personally disliked, but they were undeniably friendly for beginners and people who just wanted to get stuff done and wanted recognisable icons instead of fashion statements.
I'm more interested in the window borders - simple, clean, still distinctively amigaish.
But what really struck me was all the stuff that I'd semi-forgotten about from the Amiga, that the amiga just plain did better than "modern" OSes. Look at the Devs window. Want to install a device driver? Put it in the Devs folder, and that's assuming you've got such crappy hardware that failed to include an amiga autoconfig rom with a built-in driver. Want to install a library? Libs folder. Want to read a new kind of multimedia data type? Get a DataType for it, put it in DataTypes folder, and even programs written before the invention of the data type have a fair chance of being able to handle it.
I think it was the logical volumes ("assigns") that allowed the amiga to have a non-sucky system and application file/directory structure.