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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."
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.
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.