Guest post by Amiga Future has published the first 5 parts of a series of AmigaOS 4 programming tutorials online (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5).
We were shocked when we realised that while we’ve covered several subjects in programming for AmigaOS 4 in Amiga Future there’s been no extensive coverage of all of the many aspects. Additionally, since the release of OS4, quite a lot of time has passed by, and during that time new programming treasures have sneaked into the SDK virtually unnoticed. It’s been nine years since the authors did a similar series in “Amiga Magazin”. So, we’re launching a new 15-part series starting with a short peek at the SDK and the available development environments.
Programming aside, i’ll never understand how can people put up with amiga’s UX, when it comes to managing the interface with the mouse.
it’s just horrible.
True, I never understood why they didn’t try to modernize it somehow.
A XFCE like look would be better IMHO.
Have a look at taws.ch
A JS workbench mockup, that let’s you test different incarnations of the Amiga UI.
You will start with OS4.1 but you can switch to other versions on the fly – see “Presets”.
Just like I, having been programming since the Spectrum and C64 days, will never understand why some people keep pretending their computer is a PDP-11 with shinny graphics.
Apparently the research done at Xerox and ETHZ, was a waste of money.
“In the beginning the computer was created. This made a lot of people very unhappy and has widely been regarded as a bad move.”
Graphics systems and processor architectures come and go. Unix endures. Most recently, the web utterly devoured what used to be many categories of graphical native applications. Unix and its lineage will survive nearly forever due to being able to bolt on wildly different graphics stacks to suit the current need.
Even Unix’s own creators didn’t fully recognize this property of Unix until after Plan 9 had already failed. The Blit terminal was neat, because it could be used with a standard Unix without rewriting the core of Unix. Plan 9’s Rio was a massive advancement over the VT100… not so much compared to Aqua, Wayland, and Xorg.
As for the old saying “those who ignore Unix are doomed to reinvent it, poorly”, look at Windows Server. A VT100/ANSI aware console, WSL grafting a Linux personality onto the NT microkernel, PowerShell devouring what used to be graphical-only tasks, OpenSSHd, PowerShell open sourced and ported to unix… if NT even survives another twenty years, the server version probably won’t be called Windows anymore.
Edited 2018-02-20 19:40 UTC
Those that do not understand computers are doomed to repeat old stupid quotes on web forums, forever.
Powershell ideas go back to REPLs in the Xerox PARC workstations (Lisp, Smalltalk, Mesa), using actual data structures as communication between functions.
Also deep integration with OS APIs and ability to call any function exposed from dynamic libraries, COM or .NET objects.
Amiga also had similar ideas on Arexx.
Both have very little to do with UNIX.
PowerShell was explicitly only created because Windows was too much of a binary goop for a regular unix shell toolkit to work.
Powershell has nothing to do with UNIX, zero, nada.
Just like AmigaDOS CLI had nothing to do with UNIX, in fact it was much more powerful than any UNIX shell back in those days.
Edited 2018-02-22 06:29 UTC
And every time I am looking at C code, my mind loops back to PDP-11 macro assembly language.
Much of the outcome of the research done at Xerox and ETHZ was grafted onto C in one form or the other.
Was it?
not really in my experience. It rather ended up in things like Smaltalk and Self…
What do you think is wrong with it?
What is wrong with the mouse.
Not sure what everyone else means, unless they’re referring to the ‘spatial’ file manager? Remember when Nautilus tried setting that to default and everyone lost their shit?
Otherwise with AmigaOS 4, I believe they’ve integrated the best thing ever for Workbench, MagicMenu. So you can just right click anywhere and get the menu. Original Workbench didn’t have that, so there HAVE been improvements.
I quote like the desktop of OS4.
Well, one thing I like about my old Amiga vs the Haiku that I use today is the extra menu I got with the middle button. I don’t remember the name of the program needed but I remember various programs being available no matter where I was on the screen.
What exactly is the problem here?
It is WIMP like so many.
And every day when I’m required to use some other UI (e.g. Windows), I’m annoyed by certain aspects of it for which Amiga OS provides elegant alternatives. Things like automatically popping a window in front of other windows regardless of whether you want it or not, not having a single menu bar for all applications, not recognising multiple menu item selections, not being able to move a locked/waiting window, having the close gadget right beside other commonly-used controls, bizarre keyboard shortcuts, not being able to easily set a file requester/dialog to the path of an icon… All taken care of like a breath of fresh air on the Amiga.
I guess it can seem strange if you’re used to something else…
100% agreed. There are so many things that the Amiga does a fantastic job at. Things that show it was a multitasking operating system from the very beginning (as you say, windows not being locked is a good indication of this).
Windows still has some old mentalities surrounding it that have been there since it’s inception.
Kind of sad that Nautilus ditched it’s spatial option, I kind of liked it.
Caja in MATE can do spatial browsing, just go to options and tick open each folder in a new window. Same classic behaviour as OSX used to have and Amiga has.
Riiight, with (still today!) lack of memory protection / not isolating memory between apps…
Thank you for sharing such a good and useful information here,
http://imgaram.com/“>instagram
I got a question:
It’s popular to cram items with checkboxes into menus. Using windows, how do you check/uncheck more than one item without having to reopen the menu over and over? 🙂
Now that AROS has been out for a few years, how relevant is AmigaOS? I mean OS3 seems to be what everyone stuck with. 4 has very limited hardware choices available. Meanwhile AROS has been gaining compatibility with the older software releases and is adding x86/x86_64 hardware compatibility. It just seems that AmigaOS itself is less relevant to the Amiga scene than ever before.
So I can invest many hours, go through a 15-part tutorial, reverse engineer a complicated, poorly-documented API and… write stuff for an archaic OS.
Actually, sounds like fun!
Fun is exactly why I do it
The Amiga was fun and I have fond memories of my time with it. I don’t however have any interest in revisiting it. Nonetheless it’s pretty crazy there’s Amiga-related news in 2018.
Amiga news now always remind me of this BBC article http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-28483217