AmigaOS 3.2 and beyond
 

Greetings fellow Amigans,

I believe we need to establish a two way communication channel between
us, AmigaOS 68k developers, and you, the user.

For us, developers, it is important to get your ideas and opinions
regarding AmigaOS right. We don't want to lose the feedback loop that
is required for the constant improvement we aim for our beloved OS.

My idea is to simply invite you to this talk, since we have a lot to
tell you, but more importantly, there is a lot we need to learn and
understand from you as a user.

We are amiga fans too, and much like you, we also had enough of these
toxic repetitive rants polluting threads about my option is better
than yours, lawsuit wars, companies and source model. We haven't got
the power to change any of the above. If you want to cover these
topics, please go somewhere else and create your own thread, do not
attempt to hijack this one.

Lets have a civil conversation on technical, and perhaps much more
mundane things about our hobby and passion.

Thanks in advance.

Sounds good.

Get rid of the middleman.

Your super hard and appreciated work is tainted by those who only wish to profit off trademarks they *might* have bought eons ago. As long as that is still the "arrangement" you cannot separate your amazing work from the vile deeds of those that distribute it.

Well, that lasted all of three posts... He literally just said he can't change any of that stuff, regardless of whether anyone wants to or not.

Did you know that we got a lot of cooperation from the OS4 guys?

As weird as it may sound to some, a lot of good fellowship has
been happening between us, the AmigaOS 68k developers, and the
OS4 (PPC) Team.

Not only we shared code, but there are more than a couple of
developers that work on both OSes simultaneously.

And the results of this continued cooperation has provided us with a
lot of valuable enhancements that we have already seen materialized
in AmigaOS 3.1.4(.1) like:

-The animation datatype that got some optimisations and a convertion
routine for HAM an EHB animations to standard modes on the fly.

-The asynchronous cd-rom filesystem which supported UDF between other
things.

-The asl.library got a couple of nice features and many bugfixes that
came directly from the OS4 project.

-The MultiView utility got several fixes and learned a few new tricks
thanks to them.

-The Edit command is a complete backport from OS4.

-The overhaul of the printer.device which is in a much better working
condition than ever before.

-The test mode option in the ScreenMode Prefs Editor, which is code
that comes from OS4 too.

Also the on-going development of AmigaOS 3.2 contains much more fruits
of this partnership. And ReAction is just the tip of the iceberg.

United we are all stronger! :-)

I disagree in that they cannot change it.
You make it seem like the whole community and especially the devs are being held hostage, which I think is a fair representation, and if that's the case, it needs to stop.

We cannot have a honest, civil, adult conversation here if people keep telling you to "shut up and don't discuss that". That's not civil. And that's the main issue sadly.
I do not say the devs are the problem or that there is no cooperation as you represent. The problem is not you guys who provide us with a lot and work so much to bring this to reality. Let it be clear the problems are NOT the devs of any system.
You cannot be united if people are fighting with each other, and devs vs. community has never been a fight. We support you to the bitter end.

For your reference, the relevant paragraph from the very first post:
Emphasis mine.

I'm sorry if you misinterpreted my post, but I most certainly did not represent anything of the sort.

I really don't see how what I said could in any way lead you to think that 's what I meant.

For what it's worth, I use OS4 more than any other version of the Amiga OS, any there are so many QoL improvements there that coming back to 3.9 feels clumsy, and 3.1 downright primitive. So I for one am absolutely delighted to see so much cooperation between the OS4 and OS3 teams, and seeing the features like resizing on window borders, and shift-zoom to maximise windows being backported / borrowed / considered for OS 3.2.

Good initiative Gulliver. I have some questions concerning 3.2 and the future. Will you developers take into account that there are lots of Vampires out there ? The Vampire is so fast, that more modern features could be added. Like antializing, realtime window resize/move to name a few. What are your thoughts on the future ? got a roadmap or how do you guys work ?

Thanks! we need this talk, hopefully the trolls will stay away.

Great idee and EAB is right place for that This site is moderated.

As there is a lots of co-operation with OS4 devs could you maybe help a bit Chris Young his OS4 backport of Netsurf? It has some problems now with diskhandling and it has lost 90% of it's speed.

I know that this is not a OS3.2 and beyond, but it is close enough?

So I am a developer on AmigaOS 3.2. And I'd like to talk about some of the new stuff I've been working on. In 3.2 we have the reaction classes, and we as a group have been working hard on polishing and bugfixing them. The class I've been mostly concentrating on is the texteditor.gadget.

It is almost a complete texteditor in a single gadget. In 3.9 it is housed in EditPad, but for 3.2 I've also created a whole new editor called TextEdit. A lot of the features I've done will be available in EditPad and other places it is used. But TextEdit has a few more tricks up it's sleeve.

In list form the texteditor.gadget has recieved the following fixes and new features:
- scrollwheel mouse support (also horizontally if your mouse supports it)
- extended keyboard support (like page up and down for keyboards that have those keys)
- complete standard selection of text. (shift acts as a selection modifier when you click with mouse or use cursor keys)
- After you have selected you can click inside and then drag-move the text elsewhere in the document.
- many many smaller bug fixes
- much improved and endless amount of undo redo history
- a framework for applications to do syntax highlighting
- cursor is an I beam and it blinks to make it easier to spot
- both line wrapping and endless lines possible
- framework for doing incremental search and highlighting all hits
- support for TABs as TABs and not just converted to spaces
In short it does like you expect of a modern editor (and it is still usable on a basic 68000)

The new TextEdit application uses this gadget, and thus gains all of the above but also uses some of the gadget's new frameworks to provide some nice new features:
- incremental search and replace
- ARexx syntax highlighter
- shell script syntax highlighter

If people have further wishes or ideas I'd like to hear them so if times allow it can be done (no more highlighters in this release though)

And there is also still known bugs from earlier versions that will most likely not be fixed in this release, but naturally isn't forgotten either.

Ideas (but probably not in 3.2):
- framework for showing linenumbers
- rectangular selections
- C syntax highlighter
- assembler syntax highlighter
- installer syntax highlighter
- amigaguide syntax highlighter
- multi document tabbed interface in TextEdit
- an ARexx port

Awesome work Boemann :-)

Excellent work indeed! I like the syntax highlighting option - will these highlighters be separate files (e.g. XML definitions) so that others could add their own syntaxes?

Also, please keep the Amiga-style keyboard shortcuts (just in case you haven't already), for example, holding shift to operate to the start or end of the line, holding control to operate to the next of previous word...

Thanks for your work :)

Based on the heavily trolled and presumably locked thread on Amiga.org, I heard that GadTools.library is getting font sensitive layouts so Layout.class and GTLayout.library get to go away. Is this correct? If not, will it support a JIT-based layout instead?

I don't know what shell commands were included in 3.1.4 but a ForEach command would be helpful for those times you don't know a destination or other parameter for a list of files making List LFormat difficult to use.

I hear you...

But (sorry!) the reason why this forum thread came to happen is that we, as the people involved in the AmigaOS 3.2 work, have a very peculiar agenda.

It has become very difficult over the past two years to both receive feedback from the Amiga users for whom we are spending our time on making AmigaOS 3.2 and to provide feedback in turn to them.

Part of this problem is caused by the conditions under which this project was set up. If you want to participate in it, then you need to follow the legal constraints placed upon the work, both as a developer and as a beta tester.

Another part of the problem is in that the lawsuit concerning the ownership and rights to use the Amiga operating system source code has effectively cast doubt on the future of the operating system. What can you do, what can you say, whom do you ask for advice, assistance and are you even likely to receive it?

The outcome of this uncertainty has led to a loss of trust in the entire field. Now it seems to be it's no longer a given that any part of what makes up the Amiga community (which I would define as parties which share common interests) has something to say or share with any other part.

Finally, all of this has led to the pain, the frustration, the anger and grief which the Amiga forums either seem to brim with, or which is slowly rising to the surface.

We are aware of this situation as it is, and we are looking for a way to remedy it.

Given how far things have shifted, that's a big problem to even attempt to solve.

We talked about it, and you are now reading the first articles in this forum which we hope could start a change for the better. Reading between the lines of the Amiga forum discussions which express so much pain and grief indicates the need to be heard and the need to be acknowledged. As developers we have been absent from this kind of exchange because no dedicated channel existed so far for the AmigaOS 3.2 project.

We need to hear from you and we, in turn need to give a rationale for what we have so far attempted to accomplish with our work. Because we are primarily developers, our reasons and goals are by nature technical. What appear to be sound technical reasons for the choices we made so far are not necessarily good reasons in the eyes of those outside our own circle. We need feedback to validate what we chose to do.

Because of how this project was set up, we developers are arguably operating in a legally and morally grey area which raises both ethical and strategic/tactical questions alike. We do our work because we chose to accept the existing legal framework within which it is being done. Our options to and our desire to change/leave this framework are limited by how many layers of legal obligations this framework already sits in. While we could hope that our work and our stated intentions are good enough considering the constraints, we can only hope to affect the framework's layers which apply to us directly.

If you want to discuss these constraints, please discuss them in a different context. Where discussions of these legal matters have taken place, intermixing them with technical discussions and rationales, the end result was that the legal matters, the anger and the grief pushed everything else out.

Sorry for the long-winded introduction, but it seems so much better to say why you are hoping to improve the current state of affairs, and how, than to see another attempt to do so stumble and fail before it has even started.

@Samurai Crow:

Do you mean layout.gadget? That is not going away, and in fact has had a lot of work done on it. It is part of ReAction not GadTools, so any changes to GadTools will not affect it.

You can use either according to your needs: GadTools font sensitive layout uses a scaling factor, whereas ReAction is a fully hierarchical dynamically adjustable system.

There is still work to be done regarding the shell commands. For example, the changes that were migrated from the Envoy List/Protect to the AmigaOS4 versions have not been backported (and the Envoy Owner/Group commands are absent, too). This also goes for the ForEach command in AmigaOS4 which is based upon Andy Finkel's original command.

Yes, that is what I was referring to.

My hope is that dynamic layouts will someday have their own compiler so that constant folding can propegate through the layout and optimize away redundant operations. Bit shift optimizations wouldn't hurt on pre-060 processors either.

The syntax highlighters in this version purely coded in C and can not be customized. But for the future yeah my idea is create som sort of plugin system so third parties can created highlighteres usable in all editors. (which is part of the reason I don't want to do more highlighters for 3.2). Such third parties could then make them based on XML or very fast asm versions.

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.

Well, I'm happy and surprised that within the limitations you have you are even allowed to start up a threat like this. So kudos!

I have a question regarding dual IDE. There's been talk about an AtapiMagic module. I couldn't get it to work on my 3.1.4 A4k. And I still needed CachCDFS, native CDFileSystem I couldn't get to work either. Would be nice to explain a bit more about this and how maybe 3.2 extends it?

If taking things from AOS4 is an option, I think I like to AppDir concept and the update support. Would be call to bring that over to AOS3.

And the obvious question with the answer I already know. When? When it's done :)

Why no love for standard non blinking block cursor?