This Old Workbench Episode Twenty-Eight

Copyright © 1998,2000 Dave S. Matthews

Season Finale



First off, I am putting This Old Workbench on hiatus for a while. When I started this column, in the May 1996 issue of Amazing Computing, I had no real thought that I would still be writing about the 'classic' Amiga Workbench in 1999. As the final days of this millennium wind down, I find myself hard pressed to find fresh ground to cover as far as enhancing the Amiga's OS.

Don't get me wrong, I still love the Amiga's OS, and I still hope to write more articles in the future, but I can't feel I'm doing the Amiga, Amazing Computing or it's readers any service by rehashing material I've covered before, and over the last three years, I've covered quite a lot of ground. So, although This Old Workbench won't be a regular series, as events warrant, I will write new episodes. Also, I'll probably extend "This Old Workbench" to "This Old Amiga", and broaden the coverage to include Amiga enhancements beyond the Workbench.

As always, your feedback is important to me, so if there is anything Amiga Enhancement-wise you'd like to see, let me know, and I'll cover it if possible.


Aminet home moves


You may have experience some difficulty reaching Aminet if you used the Washington University archive at http://ftp.wustl.edu/~aminet/ Apparently, WUarchive had one too many crashes, and Urban Mueller has decided to move the main Aminet archive to a server in Germany. However the WUarchive site will continue to be an Aminet mirror, and is now back online.

NewIcons v4.5
Eric Sauvageau
Philip Vedovatti
http://www.amiganet.org/NewIcons/

Well, there's been some news on the NewIcons front, unfortunately, not all of it good. Version 4.5 of NewIcons is a maintenance release, and it may be the last version we see for a while. To quote from the Official NewIcons Web site:

"Now the bad news. If you haven't heard already, Eric Sauvageau, our programmer, has ceased further development of NewIcons. While he still has his A1200, he is now spending most of his time on his new PC. Unfortunately, this is the second time I've had to announce the loss of our main coder to another platform (Nicola left the project after version 2). Eric has been kind enough to do one last version to optimize things further and fix some minor bugs."

Philip Vedovatti, the AESIcons guy, is still involved with NewIcons, so all hope is not lost.

Figure 1: OS 3.5 Preview Icons and Visual Prefs
Figure 1: OS 3.5 Preview Icons and Visual Prefs


Visual Prefs 1.5 Beta
Massimo Tantignone
http://home.intercom.it/~amigaws/Eng/Projects.html

For the adventurous out there, Visual Prefs 1.5 is available for public beta testing. Note that programs being beta tested are not yet finished, usually have some missing functionality from the finished product, and may contain bugs. If you aren't comfortable taking a chance with new, possibly buggy software, don't download this. If you haven't tried Visual Prefs yet, you might want to start with the officially released version 1.4:

http://ftp.wustl.edu/pub/aminet/util/wb/VisualPrefs.lha

Aside from bug fixes and such, one of the really neat things in the 1.5 beta version is experimental support for bitmap images for the gadgets. See Figure 1.


AmigaOS 3.5 Preview to use GlowIcons
AmigaOS3.5: http://www.amiga.com
GlowIcons: http://reality.sgi.com/mchaput_aw/

As you know (at least if you've read the April 1999 issue of Amazing!) Workbench 3.5 is going to use NewIcons, specifically, Matt Chaput's very nicely done GlowIcons. You can find out more about AmigaOS 3.5 at Amiga Inc.'s web site, and try out the first release of GlowIcons for a preview at Matt Chaput's site. See Figure 1 again.


 


This Old Workbench, Episode 28

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