I must warn you that this is, an unusual kind of an article, starting by the way it was made.
I started to write it, even before I could put my hands on the Amiga DE. I'm hoping that by doing this; showing you how it all evolved, you could get a better impression of it, through the experience I had, seeing what kind of disappointments I may had encounter on the way (or may not) from the moment I've beginning to write it, until the moment I've finally finished it what I had imagined it would be, and what it really is.
As an avid Amigan such as myself, I've followed the steps of all Amiga plans, back from the Commodore times, where Amiga was alive and kicking, through its bankruptcy, passing by Escom, Viscorp, Gateway, and the actual owners, and I must to confess you, most of the plans were great and made a lot of sense, but they never got enough backup of the owners companies.
I recall with joy, the great time at Cologne98 with the QNX presentation, where I saw a great potential, accomplished with either a great leadership in the person of Jim Collas, a great partner- QNX and a big company to put the money where the mouth is, but it got all wrong, Jim Collas begin to diverge immensely from the original plans, Linux was going to be the next big thing, a technology used by anyone else and their cats, with little or no space to the rebirth of the Amiga Philosophy (after all that is what the Amiga is, an philosophy, a better way of doing things), so my hopes were vanished, or so I thought
Amino, founded by Fleecy Moss and Bill McEwen ex-employees of Gateway, had stepped in and acquired Amiga. They had a plan, so I started seeking what this plan was all about, one more time... as I've searched for all the other plans. They share a fate already seen before, their plans also like Gateway, turned into another direction, but these time they didn't step so deep as Gateway did. They opted for reviving the AmigOS, which is not an entirely a bad thing, integrating both AmigaDE and AmigaOS by its 5th revision.
The main focus this time was putted on the OS, instead of the Hardware, as many in the past, so they've chosen TAOS has their foundations and TAO, its creator as their partners.
This departure from the Hardware brings for the first time, the independence from the machine itself, giving the possibility of conquering a much wider market, without having to worry where it runs, and giving the possibility to 'write once, run it everywhere' unlike others systems, where even if you have the possibility to run in many CPUs, the programs had to be compiled for each one of them. Other great feature was that it could run on multiple CPUs, fine, others also do that; you may say, but others can't run on different processor like TAOS can.
Another thing that this plan brings that others don't, is the fact that this one takes a much more realistic approach, and not a megaloman one as Gateway did. This plan turns to be affordable, even for a company as Amiga Inc., and, if the foundations on which Amiga Inc. is building its core, share the main elements from the AmigaOS with a nice presentation, it has the potential to be successful, bringing the Amiga name to where it belongs, with a new earth, but with the same soul.
This can be the turning point on Amigas fate, we could actually see the rise of a new paradigm shift in how the user interacts with the "digital being". Amiga can again lead the computer evolution.
We will see the time, where the programmers starts to take in special account the optimization of their programs, and here, Amiga with its VP assembler takes a major role in easing this task.
People will be tired of bogus software that crash all the time, has its standards controlled... they will see the options out there, seeking for the best, a solution that don't cause them a nervous breakdown, that leads them the way they want, and not the way around, this shift will turn people more productive at what they do, not feeling that kind of loss we feel knowing that there is a better way to do things...
After all this merchandise from Amiga, saying that they will implement all the Amiga spirit based on these foundations, one felt curious to know how good these really are... the pics shown, reveals only its potential, but don't do any good when it comes to know about performance. So when I found such an opportunity to get my hands on it, I simply couldn't resist... seeing for myself the new system in action without having to go to the shows (not a bad thing, but in Portugal there are none, and to travel to other countries is a rather difficult task).
Some pictures shown on the net, shows it in action, but give us no clues about its smoothness, of how it all behave.
Much was already said about AmigaDE, so I'm not going to talk about it, I'll start now by showing a little bit of the AmigaDE, and although I hadn't a lot to play with, I'll try to show to you the most of it, through some exhaustive tests of what was given on this Party Pack, with my rather limited knowledge of this entirely new system.
I've performed some tests, so that I can see how well it perform in extreme situations, so as I couldn't use either Quake or Doom to perform an heavy load on Processor, I have to use what it was given, and opened 105 windows, namely using the all demos submenu, doing that, open all the demos available, and thinking that it wasn't enough, I've managed to open one few more boing balls and movies, so I was ready for seeing how it all performed.
I felt a little slow down on the windows refresh, but not a big amount of, the movies (at least the ones I could see:') didn't reveal any slowdown, neither the bouncing boing balls. Needless to say that I need about 6 minutes to be able to close all the windows!! :')
While I was doing this, I've done some benchmarks using the command speed given on the PP, but the speed never dropped too much.
Next, I evaluated the interaction between the ball and the background, but, only seen to believe: the ball bounces, and their shadow reacts whichever background present, different background, windows with filters you name it, it did all in real- time! The ball passing behind, on front of window with sepia effect, false colour, alpha gradient with colours!! The Ball bounced was seen passing trough a window with an alpha channel, the conjunction of various windows on top of each other performing their tasks, mixing their effects!! WOW like Saint Thomas, you must see to believe!
Next step had to be a font analysis. The Fonts were antialised, so I thought of comparing them with the antialization of a known paint program- PaintShop Pro, not the worlds best, but god enough to compare. And I've to say, they are both using the same algorithm made for this antialization, as they're both equals!! Is Amiga stealing PSP7, or was it the other way around!?;')
The AmigaDE takes a new departure from Classic OS in windows sizing, by allowing the user to choose, whenever possible, any of the windows borders. So, if you select the right border, it will resize the width of the window, if you select the bottom left corner it will resize both the width and height of it, and so on You're no longer tied to choose the right corner only, for resizing the window.
Having tried everything I had access to, I've began my entrance in these 'new kind' of Amiga Shell.
Whether they were new commands, or just a mere equivalent ones with a new name, all of them all have a new way of behaving, besides that, there are some quirks, maybe due to the early stages of this shell.
For example, you have to type all the extension of the path of a program, so that it can run (i.e- $ demo/ave/edit). Another demise, is the fact that when you use the left arrow button in conjunction with the shift key, it gives you nothing more than some weird characters, instead of going directly to the beginning of the line, as we are used to
A good feature though, is the help function present for each one of the commands, although, I haven't managed yet to close it, so that I can still make use of the shell (i.e. after a thoroughly read at the manuals, I've finally found what I had to do to keep using the shell, I only need to press the Q key:)
Summarizing it, at this early point it is nowhere usable as the kingcon shell I'm used to work now, its up to Amiga Inc. to increase its usability, and to take it closer to what we are used, with all the improvements it possess.
AmigaOS
dir
list
copy
move
rename
delete
sort
run
echo
type
AmigaDE
dir
ls
cp
mv
mv
rm
sort
run
echo
cat
Another thing that everyone at Amiga talks about, are the speeds this system can achieve, so I run the Java demos, well they seem pretty fast to me, but as I loaded them on IE, they turned to be as fast as the speeds achieved by the Java Engine present on AmigaDE not a big achievement by any means...
I was expecting an improvement over the others Java Engines, but that wasn't shown, at least I couldn't be aware of any.
This is the end of the review, but I'm hoping that you could help me improving it, by helping me correct some of the mistakes present in this review. For any further questions you can mail me at: