AmigaOS 3.1.4 successor wishlist

[Pyromania]

Originally Posted by lantus360

open source and put it on github.

Microsoft which now owns Github would be in love with reviewing AmigaOS sources.

[idrougge]

Fixed swedish locale.

[gulliver]

Originally Posted by idrougge

Fixed swedish locale.

Would you like to help me on that?

I can make the work, but I dont know swedish nor even know what needs to be fixed. So if you really want it we need to team up to make it happen.

I did locales for spanish, portuguese and fixed a bit of the french and italian ones between others, so I can assure you it is a tedious job. But if you are commited we can get it done.

BTW, if someone else finds there is a locale which needs fixes just let me know.

[kolla]

Norwegian ones (bokmål and nynorsk) will be on aminet when I am done.

[idrougge]

I've worked on localisation before, so sure.

[wiser3]

Can't believe i didn't think of this very needed feature earlier.
- change WB screen mode even though applications are open on it
I'm sure we all find this limitation frustrating.

[Jope]

Here are some dreams:

- Right click (or hold left) on the screen depth gadget = screen menu, right click (or hold left) on a window depth gadget = window menu.
- Toolsdaemon functionality built in to wb prefs.
- CPU Blitter replacement which is togglable on/off in the preferences?
- A tool to customize our kickstart images in an officially supported way. All kinds of popular stuff like border blank = on, wildstar = on, noclick = on, prepareemul = off, perhaps the aforementioned cpublit = on, etc. that could could be specified. Alternatively incorporate all of these into some preferences editor.
- Atomic updates + no more validation for FFS (is this even doable? pfs3 exists anyway)

Maybe I'll think of more later..

[wiser3]

Shortcut icons that launch exe or script from another location. For example, launch an exe from wbstartup without moving the exe into wbstartup.

[asymetrix]

@thread

Why does locale have to be even an issue ?

Why cant we redesign it and automate the thing ?

XML text to code / binary
Machine readable format like Json.

Update .guide format to support import SVG, asciidoc and be able to create painless Interactive (dynamic) epub3 files.

[demolition]

Originally Posted by wiser3

Shortcut icons that launch exe or script from another location. For example, launch an exe from wbstartup without moving the exe into wbstartup.

I think we already can do this? Just create a .info inside WBStartup which points to the appropriate program.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Yes you can make a script and launch from Icon with Iconx

You can do even better and faster with "Icon-Link"

- Create Icon-Link (it also works with data, you just have to add the right tool)
- To drag Icon Link to WBStartup

[Michael]

UTF-8 support

This is more complicated then it should be, and it has to be supported on application level too. FileSystems. And god knows how to handle all this. So if it happens, it requires a complete rewrite of all parts to work properly. For me, a working text editor would have been enough for now, but we don't have any third party solutions that work either.
We can read such documents, but that's about it.

An OS integrated keymap switcher is required to begin with, something that lacks in AmigaOS but is available everywhere else by now.

[kolla]

Originally Posted by Michael

An OS integrated keymap switcher is required to begin with, something that lacks in AmigaOS but is available everywhere else by now.

Huh, what's wrong with input prefs? Just save prefs as presets and load whatever preset you need with USE flag/tooltype.

[hth313]

Originally Posted by Michael

UTF-8 support

This is more complicated then it should be, and it has to be supported on application level too. FileSystems. And god knows how to handle all this. So if it happens, it requires a complete rewrite of all parts to work properly. For me, a working text editor would have been enough for now, but we don't have any third party solutions that work either.
We can read such documents, but that's about it.

Having translated a large application on Windows, I can only say that UTF-8 for ordinary application programs is actually surprisingly simple, as long as you adopt the idea of "UTF-8 everywhere". If you do that, you have little problems as UTF-8 is just a sequence of byte characters. The main problem is when you need to interpret it to present the actual text, meaning character to font mapping and possibly if your system (like Windows) is totally unable to to handle UTF-8 in its APIs. In the latter case you have a few places to make conversions.

The application was large and had not been written with localization in mind at all. With this approach it turned out much easier that I ever could have imagined.

I am not saying it is always simple, merely that thinking it is very bad is not necessarily the case with UTF-8, if you adopt a good mindset on how to do it.

[Michael]

Originally Posted by kolla

Huh, what's wrong with input prefs? Just save prefs as presets and load whatever preset you need with USE flag/tooltype.

Simple, it has to be a quick keyboard combo to do the keymap switch per application, possibly several different keymap switches (if you use more then 2 languages) and it should not waist memory and reload anything during such operation, so it's a special tool, that can also influence how applications react (eg spell checking on the fly) and possibly on the fly codepage to utf-8 and back conversion (for simple utf-8 use and staying compatible to old software.


Full UTF-8 would require a lot of things reworked, like file systems, printer drivers (currently they don't support chatsets/code pages either)



On the contrary, Intelligent engine since 3.0 supports characters above 256 chars and fonts included with the OS had some unicode like symbols embedded and you can even use the library to draw any glyph you like.
So if C= was around a bit longer, we would have been there eventually.
Locale support on Amiga was one of the best and first in computer history and still is sophisticated enough. For example MUI can use catalog files in UTF-8 format already for some years now, using the old locale library!.
That's how flexible and well thought out some of the amigaos components were, and at the same time light and resource efficient.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by kolla

Huh, what's wrong with input prefs? Just save prefs as presets and load whatever preset you need with USE flag/tooltype.

Too obvious, too simple, and works on existing Amigas. Totally unacceptable! How are you going to convince the marks to pony up for new hardware and software if they don't need to?

[kolla]

Yeah, and we cannot use input prefs because... IPv6!!! Well, I already have multiple layouts that I easily cycle through via an FKey defined hotkey, I'm sure I am not alone.

[kolla]

Speaking of MUI, the OS could do with an official non-MUI variant of PSI, a public screen manager to define, open and close public screens. And Intuition could have a cleaner interface for adding user defined stuff to screen bars.

[Michael]

Originally Posted by kolla

Speaking of MUI, the OS could do with an official non-MUI variant of PSI, a public screen manager to define, open and close public screens. And Intuition could have a cleaner interface for adding user defined stuff to screen bars.

FKey keymap switching usually waist memory on every operation and fragments it.



Don't know how useful are custom screens and do we have a commodity to force certain application to use other then WB screen ?
I believe most tools that need a custom screen can open one themselves,
or they can hijack other screens.


Then we have higher resolutions these days and we get more on one screen, so the use of custom screens is less of an issue now for small apps.

Being a CGX user for 20+ years and it was tough in the begging, but the end I am more comfortable now on WB, and with improved layers window arrangements are not as slow as they could get in the past.



I agree, this feature is nice to have, but not a must and partial solutions like PSI are available.


As for the ScrrenTitleBar, this is a must have, again for many things,
clocks, keyboard info, other notifications. Basically it's purpose is the same as windows status bar.

[patrik]

Originally Posted by idrougge

I've worked on localisation before, so sure.

I do miss all the great workbench keyboard shortcuts from the swedish 3.1 locale.

I normally use english on my computers, but on 3.1, the workbench keyboard shortcuts are so much better with the swedish locale, so I use swedish .