AmigaOS 3.2 and beyond

[Tigerskunk]

So, how about the Guru Meditation?
Will we get it back?

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by boemann

As for the standard amiga modifers. No is the short answer. The slightly longer is that the Amiga is the only one still holding on to this non standard choice, and even Commodore recognized this back in 93 and were going to change it too. Many wordproccessors on the amiga also use the more modern and world standard modifiers. And this actually goes in line with the fact that shift acts as extended selection modifier in conjunction with the mouse even on the Amiga. That is why Commoodore wanted to fix this. And why I have changed it now. That said, at least inside the code there is a switch to change it.

Thanks god.
Sorry to all those people who like them, but stuff like those weirdo key combinations that act completely different from everywhere else is keeping me from using my Amigas more often.
Does that btw also mean the left Amiga key will be used for shortcuts instead of the right one?
That one always felt so weird to me, since you need to use both hands instead of just one for simple stuff like cut/copy/paste, savin, etc...

Everything I hear about 3.2. sounds great. Keep up the awesome work, guys und dudettes..

[boemann]

Originally Posted by Steril707

Does that btw also mean the left Amiga key will be used for shortcuts instead of the right one?
That one always felt so weird to me, since you need to use both hands instead of just one for simple stuff like cut/copy/paste, savin, etc...

Everything I hear about 3.2. sounds great. Keep up the awesome work, guys und dudettes..

No it is still the right Amiga where you would use ctrl+something on windows
and command+something on mac

The reason is that the left amiga is reserved for system shortcuts, and a whole history of applications have worked with such assumptions. So even if we would, it would cause no end of problems.

Btw please note that this change of modifiers is for ReAction string and texteditor gadgets only. At least so far. Old string gadgets doesn't even have the concept of selections, and our ROM space is so limited that so far I've not dared to add selections to those gadgets.

And thanks for being excited - it keeps the motivation high for us

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by Steril707

Thanks god.
Sorry to all those people who like them, but stuff like those weirdo key combinations that act completely different from everywhere else is keeping me from using my Amigas more often.

Like what? On the whole I much prefer the Amiga shortcuts to the common PC ones as they feel more natural and intuitive. But I use lots of different operating systems and just make do with the different shortcuts and paradigms they offer.

Does that btw also mean the left Amiga key will be used for shortcuts instead of the right one?
That one always felt so weird to me, since you need to use both hands instead of just one for simple stuff like cut/copy/paste, savin, etc...

I don't have particularly large hands, but I can reach those shortcuts with one hand. But, besides that, it's standard keyboard practice to use the opposite hand for qualifiers, e.g. capital E is left hand for E and right hand for shift. Of course, that doesn't carry for shortcuts on the right hand side of the keyboard, e.g. Right-Amiga-O, but I do like having separate qualifiers for system-wide and application-specific shortcuts.

Originally Posted by boemann

Old string gadgets doesn't even have the concept of selections

This is true, but GadTools string gadgets and console windows do use some of the movement shortcuts we were discussing earlier, including shift+arrows/delete/backspace. I guess these would be updated to follow the same basic function as the ReAction counterparts then? I think consistency is important to maintain, at least as far as is practical - one thing that really annoys me about using Microsoft Office for my day job is that Ctrl+F is Find everywhere except Outlook, where it's Ctrl+E. Which, of course is centre align in Word, even when Word is used by Outlook for composing email...

[Kyle_Human]

Originally Posted by th4t1guy

One thing that's always annoyed me with Workbench is how icons tend to pile on top of each other. It seems to happen all the time to me, especially when copying folders/files from PC. It would be great to see the need to run "clean up" and "snapshot" disappear.

I'm surprised I didn't bring this up because it's been one of the biggest annoyances since day one. It's survived several releases, so no doubt some unixbeard type will come in and tell us why this problem no other OS has can't be fixed/isn't a problem/is actually good.

[boemann]

Originally Posted by Steril707

So, how about the Guru Meditation?
Will we get it back?

It is a toxic subject with no good solution.
Some want it back for nostalgic reasons but it is a lighthearted thing not really becoming for a mature operating system.

All kinds of arguments can be made back and fourth
- Windows BSOD has a smiley, and that is not ill perceived
- AmigaOS hasn't had the guru since 1.2 or so
- Most Amigans are nostalgic rather than using it as a daily modern system

I guess there are as many arguments as there are people. So please let's not discuss it. It is distracting from the important goal of making the OS better.

What it all boils down to is that there is no right and wrong answer. It's the sort of thing were you might have an option for the user to choose, but this is ROM so we can't.

I'm personally strongly in favor of the guru, but even if we changed it we would just have the opposite group arguing forever. And in the end we will all loose valuable time discussing.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by Kyle_Human

I'm surprised I didn't bring this up because it's been one of the biggest annoyances since day one. It's survived several releases, so no doubt some unixbeard type will come in and tell us why this problem no other OS has can't be fixed/isn't a problem/is actually good.

Big fan of the insulting stereotypes, eh? Tells a lot about you. And no, I'm not a unixbeard type

That doesn't really happen with me, so I'm not sure what you might be doing to cause it. Files without icons, or with icons but no stored positions, aren't on top of each other when I open a drive full of PC files for example. They're a bit messy since they use the left of the text label for alignment, and both the text label and the icon sizes can vary dramatically (which isn't the case on other platforms). OS4 tries to align these icons by their centres instead of the left edge, which helps somewhat, so maybe that's another feature that could be borrowed from NG systems.

I can imagine having icons piled on top of each other would be very annoying indeed, so I hope you can find what's going wrong with your system that causes it.

[Olaf Barthel]

Originally Posted by th4t1guy

One thing that's always annoyed me with Workbench is how icons tend to pile on top of each other. It seems to happen all the time to me, especially when copying folders/files from PC. It would be great to see the need to run "clean up" and "snapshot" disappear.

We're still stuck with how Workbench has been doing its icon wrangling since 1985. The cleanup still works, though, but I'd say one could do better. The Macintosh Finder had a feature which would let you lasso the icons you wanted to be cleaned up, and then these would be reordered. That's a small step which should be possible to build without upsetting the apple cart.

Both the Macintosh Finder and Microsoft's Explorer had fixed-size icons to wrangle, whereas the Amiga Workbench must somehow deal with the greater flexibility of icons being any size or shape. This is the price we pay for the flexibility: ordering/organizing icons by shape and dimensions becomes much harder and you can't perform that job efficiently either.

The function which is responsible for the cleanup operation we have today is a good example for the drawbacks of having to do a difficult job that is hard to do well. Sorting icons is hard if all the icons are potentially of a different size.

[Olaf Barthel]

Originally Posted by Steril707

So, how about the Guru Meditation?
Will we get it back?

What do you need it to accomplish?

In 1985/1986 the title was an oblique humorous reference to one of the peripheral game devices which Amiga, Inc. made for the Atari VCS 2600. That was the Joyboard (Amiga, Inc. also made joysticks), which the programmer responsible for the software failure message was supposed to sit on, keep it in balance and ponder what went wrong.

You are seeing an error message after all, and a cryptic one at that. I personally find its shortcomings to be in not being too helpful in diagnosing problems, unless you write short 68k assembly fragments which manage to divide by zero, access an address they shouldn't have in this manner, or any of the other simple stuff that might get you in trouble.

In my opinion this software failure message does not become any helpful by replacing the title.

Now if we had a better diagnostic mechanism behind that message, that would be something. In days of old, you could exactly that by having plugged a nullmodem cable into the serial port of the Amiga, connecting it to either another Amiga or a workstation running the remote debugger. While this is technically still possible today, it would be helpful to capture all that debugging information for later use if you debug natively or remotely with a debugger of your choice. We are still very much anchored in how this kind of debugging work was done in the 1990'ies.

[Jope]

Originally Posted by Rotzloeffel

Yes, all of these are implementet…. iconifying Windows, resize from every Edge....

Sounds great. :-)

[boemann]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

This is true, but GadTools string gadgets and console windows do use some of the movement shortcuts we were discussing earlier, including shift+arrows/delete/backspace. I guess these would be updated to follow the same basic function as the ReAction counterparts then? I think consistency is important to maintain, at least as far as is practical - one thing that really annoys me about using Microsoft Office for my day job is that Ctrl+F is Find everywhere except Outlook, where it's Ctrl+E. Which, of course is centre align in Word, even when Word is used by Outlook for composing email...

Yes I'm very aware of the inconsistency and like you I think it is not very good.

shift + delete/backspace still work like they used and do so everywhere. There was no need to change as it can never shadow something to do with selections.

shift+cursors in old gadgets will probably stay, but ctrl+cursors can possibly be added for consistency. I'll have to look into it

In console there is further problems as ctrl+cursor simply can't be communicated from console to shell. We've run out of escape sequences afaik.

[Kyle_Human]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

That doesn't really happen with me, so I'm not sure what you might be doing to cause it. Files without icons, or with icons but no stored positions, aren't on top of each other when I open a drive full of PC files for example. They're a bit messy since they use the left of the text label for alignment, and both the text label and the icon sizes can vary dramatically (which isn't the case on other platforms). OS4 tries to align these icons by their centres instead of the left edge, which helps somewhat, so maybe that's another feature that could be borrowed from NG systems.

I can imagine having icons piled on top of each other would be very annoying indeed, so I hope you can find what's going wrong with your system that causes it.

You're telling fibs now, because the described behavior not only happened on any Amiga I've ever owned, but any I've ever seen anyone else use too.

It's really easily reproducible. Just install some software, or uncompress an LHA. The newly created folder icon will be in some weird place, either partially overlapping a pre-existing one, or just as often, positioned about two thousand pixels off screen in a stupid direction so that you have to scroll the workbench window forever to find it. It will also be in whatever icon style the software developer personally likes, screen pallet be damned, so you get to see a hell of a lot of blue-and-purple Magic Workbench icons.

This is normal Amiga behavior that yours does too and I don't believe you if you say it doesn't. Except, maybe you have a commodity to improve icon handling and you have simply forgot. That's possible, but surely the point of new OS releases should be to take basic functions out of the commodities and back into the OS.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by boemann

Yes I'm very aware of the inconsistency and like you I think it is not very good.

[...]

In console there is further problems as ctrl+cursor simply can't be communicated from console to shell. We've run out of escape sequences afaik.

Yeah, that occurred to me too. That's part of why I included the reference to the MS Office inconsistencies - I appreciate that sometimes, no matter how big or small a dev team you have, you end up in situations that simply can't be fixed due to a variety of reasons. I'm sure that whatever the end result is, it will be as good as can reasonably be expected given the circumstances.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by Kyle_Human

You're telling fibs now, because the described behavior not only happened on any Amiga I've ever owned, but any I've ever seen anyone else use too.

Ummmm, nope. What I did to test: fresh boot, opening a drawer copied directly from a PC, no icons, Window->Show->All Files. They're somewhat haphazard and in no particular order, but are spread the full height of the window and continue off to the right quite a distance without leaving any massive gaps.

It's really easily reproducible. Just install some software, or uncompress an LHA. The newly created folder icon will be in some weird place, either partially overlapping a pre-existing one, or just as often, positioned about two thousand pixels off screen in a stupid direction so that you have to scroll the workbench window forever to find it.

That sounds more like an issue with icons having poorly chosen coordinates saved in their .info files. I did also open a few lha files, with the same results as above but fewer files.

It will also be in whatever icon style the software developer personally likes, screen pallet be damned, so you get to see a hell of a lot of blue-and-purple Magic Workbench icons.

That's also an issue I haven't had in many, many years. But maybe I'm seeing where your issue is now...

This is normal Amiga behavior that yours does too and I don't believe you if you say it doesn't.

I don't care what you do or don't believe. I'm very familiar with my machines and their behaviours, and I even bothered to check *again* there. I know what I see, and there are no overlapping icons.

Except, maybe you have a commodity to improve icon handling and you have simply forgot.

Nope, I know my systems intimately, including every single piece of software installed. Besides, I generally keep my systems very clean for software testing purposes - additional patches have caused plenty of issues over the years so I'm careful to know everything that's going on.

It sounds to me like your issue is that you're still using 3.1, or even older. I've been using 3.9 since it came out (most of my systems are using 3.9BB2 with very little additional software), and more recently, 3.1.4 which has very similar behaviour in both icon positioning and palette. Having had very little use of 3.1 or before for anything other than basic testing, I haven't had to deal with any of its shortcomings for decades now.

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by Olaf Barthel

What do you need it to accomplish?

In 1985/1986 the title was an oblique humorous reference to one of the peripheral game devices which Amiga, Inc. made for the Atari VCS 2600. That was the Joyboard (Amiga, Inc. also made joysticks), which the programmer responsible for the software failure message was supposed to sit on, keep it in balance and ponder what went wrong.

It's one of the most famous "Amigaisms" there is, alongside the Boing Ball, the prototype called Lorraine, Denise/Agnus/Paula/Gary, the rainbow checkmark, Mitchie the dogs paw inside the 1000s case or double state icons (which serve no particular cause as well, btw. And like you stated, the variable size icons are just a headache these days. time to get rid of them as well, i guess).

I guess even you calls it a "guru" (really everybody does ) when it happens, and not "oh, a software failure happened". I certainly know Thomas Richter does from him writing that in different forums, though he also is strictly against putting that wording back into the OS.

I guess it's not much work replacing that string, and it would be a nice little gesture to the community, who basically thrives on nostalgia.

I guess most people are using Amiga OS and the workbench to this day because of them warm feelings, not because it's the most efficient OS out there (at the moment )

Anyway, you do you, and I will get 3.2 regardless of if the Guru is back or not, off course..

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Like what? On the whole I much prefer the Amiga shortcuts to the common PC ones as they feel more natural and intuitive.

Because you are used to them, I guess.

Originally Posted by Daedalus

I don't have particularly large hands, but I can reach those shortcuts with one hand.

Yep, I can reach r-Amiga+X as well with one hand.
Doesn't mean that it's ergonically making sense to stretch your hand like that for a function that's used so many times during normal daily work.
That would be using cut copy paste and saving. Which are all on the left side of the keyboard.

It's horrible if you have to copy and paste a whole lot of items and need to use this key combo on the Amiga.
On the other side, having to use both hands for this if you'd like to steer your mouse to the place where you want to copy and paste to is bad as well..

Twist it as you like, it's just shitty and much worse for real work situations than what's on Windows or MacOS.

If we talk to get AmigaOS back to being a usable OS, stuff like that needs to be considered, imo.

[kamelito]

@Olsen
Since Thor wrote tools for MMU, a low level debugger and a disassembler library it would be nice to have some kind of grim ripper when you could see registers etc and also be able to disassemble the crash using the OS if it’s still alive or COP if not to be able to track the error. It would be nice for developers.

[Minuous]

Originally Posted by Kyle_Human

It will also be in whatever icon style the software developer personally likes, screen pallet be damned, so you get to see a hell of a lot of blue-and-purple Magic Workbench icons.

That issue has been solved for twenty years.

[Kyle_Human]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Ummmm, nope. What I did to test: fresh boot, opening a drawer copied directly from a PC, no icons, Window->Show->All Files. They're somewhat haphazard and in no particular order, but are spread the full height of the window and continue off to the right quite a distance without leaving any massive gaps.

So you did something I wasn't talking about, so you didn't see what I described, instead you accidentally demonstrated a second icon handling problem.

Not exacty a stunning defense of AmigaOS. It's like if you tried to find evidence that your client hadn't stabbed someone, and then accidentally found proof he'd shot the stabbed man's wife too.

Originally Posted by Daedalus

That sounds more like an issue with icons having poorly chosen coordinates saved in their .info files. I did also open a few lha files, with the same results as above but fewer files.

A completely trashy behavior, unknown on other platforms.

It sounds to me like your issue is that you're still using 3.1, or even older.

No.

Originally Posted by Minuous

That issue has been solved for twenty years.

No it hasn't. There's no AmigaOS release which has ever solved the problem. In fact AmigaOS is designed to encourage it because of the .info files. If a developer decided that he's shipping README with a README.info with blurple MWB icon, then that's what you'll get, and you can get rich betting it's going to try and open in some weird program nobody uses anymore like muchmore too.

Amiga icon handling is very, very bad. .info littering everwhere we can't get rid of, but there has to be other improvements. It would be nice if we could mark a file hidden instead of having to delete the .info and lose all it's tooltypes, icon image, etc. It would also be nice if we could set workbench to snap icons to a grid, because having to manually sort and snapshot is beyond irritating. Occasionally snapshot doesn't even stick.

Snapshotting icons is something ridiculous that only makes sense if you think "it's always been this way", and that "there's no other way". No other OS acts like this, it doesn't allow the user any better control, so it's not a feature, it's an annoyance.

[th4t1guy]

Originally Posted by Olaf Barthel

We're still stuck with how Workbench has been doing its icon wrangling since 1985.... Sorting icons is hard if all the icons are potentially of a different size.

I was afraid it was going to be something like this. I'm not a power user by any means but it's something that happens enough to me that I feel the age of the OS starts to show when it occurs. Thanks for the detailed explanation!