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Amiga GUI Operating Systems Software

Default AmigaOS4 Icon Set Revealed 45

Posted by timothy from the age-appropriate-and-very-work-safe dept.
Mike Bouma writes "A new screenshot showing OS4's default icon set by Martin 'Mason' Merz has been revealed. Also Q&A session 27 with Amiga's CTO Fleecy Moss is now available. Hyperion, Eyetech, AmigaWorld.net and many more exhibitors will attend the upcoming AmiGBG fair in Sweden." I also like the fantasy Amiga linked to from the Q&A session.
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Default AmigaOS4 Icon Set Revealed More

Default AmigaOS4 Icon Set Revealed

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  • Wee! (Score:5, Funny)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @08:00PM (#8299500) Homepage Journal
    "A new screenshot showing OS4's default icon set by Martin 'Mason' Merz has been revealed."

    A small handful of people rejoice!!

  • BSD IS....oh wait a minute (Score:5, Funny)

    by bluethundr ( 562578 ) * on Monday February 16, 2004 @08:04PM (#8299529) Homepage Journal
    ...nevermind.

  • That's nice, but... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by vga_init ( 589198 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @08:10PM (#8299568) Journal
    ...where are the machines for me to run it on?

    I'm not making fun of anyone here, and I seriously would like to know; I've always been hearing about Amiga this and Amiga that here on Slashdot every once in a while, and doing a little sniffing around on the web there appears to be a pretty active Amiga community. Also, they're still developing the operating system, so there still must be Amigas, right? Right?

    Well, that's what I was hoping, but after doing some heavy searching on google I haven't been able to turn up a single machine. All of the suspect web sites like Amiga's corporate site and other places don't give any information other than "Contact your local Amiga dealer." Great. Where am I supposed to find one of those? After a little searching about that, nothing good really came up. Most of the sites I found either a) didn't exist anymore or b) didn't really have any Amiga stuff.

    Okay, maybe I am just looking in all of the wrong places, but if somebody could point me out to some good resources then that would be great; I always love to try different and unusual systems, and I'm really interested in this AmigaOS. I just don't have anything to run it on.

  • RE: (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 16, 2004 @08:13PM (#8299590)
    Wow, those Amiga OS 4 icons just scream "Welcome to 1995."

  • Pretty awful. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 16, 2004 @08:54PM (#8299927)
    As someone else pointed out - how very 1990's. These icons are fine for 640x480 in 4-bit color, absolutely useless at 1600x1200 in 32-bit color.

    The problem is that the look and feel of this new Amiga desktop is still based on pixel-by-pixel hand-made artwork. At higher resolutions it leaves the images looking very busy because of the detailed work that lacks anti-aliasing - yet also very bland because of the limited use of color.

    The solution (as chosen by the designers of Windows XP, MacOS and others) - is to use vector artwork as the source. Scalable graphics formats can be rendered to images of any size. No icon should be terribly complicated - but when it's rendered to a small image, vector images gain automatic sub-pixel anti-aliasing and resizing of their smooth color gradients. Both of which are too complicated to do efficiently by hand when working pixel-by-pixel - but they make the final on-screen result look infinitely better.

    • Re:Pretty awful. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by dave_f1m ( 602921 )
      Looks fine to me. Did you happen to notice the image *is* 1600x1200 24bit color? And that's what I looked at it on, 1600x1200 24bit color. The icons looked a little large to me, but that's the opposite of what you're claiming. Oops, you say they look busy in 32-bit color. Well, much as I might like to, I can't afford a Parhelia, and that would only get me to 30bit anyway. What video card do you have? Your "solution" doesn't solve any problem you claim it does.

    • Re:Pretty awful. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by notamac ( 750472 ) *
      Small correction... MacOS uses a 128x128 bitmap for icons, and XP uses an even smaller bitmap for its icons... So no vector graphics there :)

      • Re:Pretty awful. (Score:3, Informative)

        by leerpm ( 570963 )
        He said the sources for the graphics, not the actual file used by the operating system. i.e. The graphic artists who do the icons in MacOS and XP use vector-based graphics when they are creating their icons, whereas the Amiga ones seem to have been drawn pixel-by-pixel instead.
    • Yeah. These icons are nothing compared to the work [everaldo.com] of Everaldo [everaldo.com], KDE's chief icon guy. Plus, in the next KDE release KSVG may mature enough to render all the icons from the source SVG instead of using bitmap copies. This means fully resizable icons even better than OS X's.

  • Too little too late. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Godeke ( 32895 ) * on Monday February 16, 2004 @09:23PM (#8300120)
    I loved my Amiga. It was capable of doing things that my PC using friends were blown away by. The custom hardware was, in its day, the most advanced on the market for the ordinary consumer.

    That day is past: looking at this desktop I see nothing that different from any other desktop. My love for the Amiga was its ability to crank tracker sound files while doing work. The ability to play games far cooler than any the PC world could generate. The ability to multitask while compiling software.

    Today, even a modest PC with XP home can do all that and more. I'm really not seeing the value that "Amiga" brings to the table. Sure, it brings back memories, but I'm more apt to fire up my emulator to revist some classics than to want a new OS that runs on... what?

    • Re:Too little too late. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mdwh2 ( 535323 )

      One could make the same point to every Mac and Linux (along with everything else) article.

      Yes, Windows can do what the Amiga did ten years ago, and more (I would hope so!) but I guess some people still prefer alternatives to Windows. There's more to a computer than custom hardware and a quick look at a static screenshot (and even if there wasn't, that wouldn't make Windows automatically better by default!)

  • Can't the amiga do alpha transparency (look along the diagonal edges of the icons)? or are these just beta icons?

  • First you get the Icons. (Score:4, Funny)

    by SirDrinksAlot ( 226001 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @11:00PM (#8300980) Journal
    Then you get the Fonts.
    Then you get the vaporware of the year award.

  • The Amiga underdog... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by BobWeiner ( 83404 )
    ...while I've never even used an Amiga before in my life, I still root for those that are hanging onto their Amigas. Not everyone needs a PC or a Mac, and I'm all for diversity in OS's. Will the Amiga ever rise again from the ashes? Not likely. But, it is fun to read about what the Amiga community is up to every now and then.

    -Bob
  • That GrimReaper icon ownz.
  • Wow! I just can't WAIT to use these new icons! I'm just GIDDY with excitement! All this time I thought Amiga didn't have their crap together, and they go and prove me wrong by releasing these way cool ICONS! Amiga isn't dead! Look at the pretty ICONS! Yeah, your desktop has ICONS, but they're not the official AMIGA ICONS! Oh wowowowowowowow.

    So, where do I download the Nautilus tarball for my Linux machine?

  • I can imagine the "brainstorming" (or was it brainf@rting) process at the Amiga headquarters: "Let's release the screenshots! We'll be like Microsoft! Everyone will drool and jump up and down in anticipation." I guess they are in for a great surprise - the product is just as dead as it can be and the best thing they can do is to admit it and give it a proper burial (hell, they might even consider open-sourcing it, although, again, not may would care).

    The assumption of Amiga OS team living in a cave for la

    • hell, they might even consider open-sourcing it, although, again, not may would care

      I'm sure those involved with AROS or MorphOS would care.

      If you don't care, why do you bother reading and posting to articles about it? Unless perhaps you're the teenager with too much time on your hand, of course.

      • I'm sure those involved with AROS or MorphOS would care.

        That's just fine. My point is, AROS, MorphOS, or AnyOtherSuperCoolOS are just as irrelevant as AmigaOS or CPM are. The big OS competition on PC platform is down to Windows vs Linux and the cost of entry for any other OS is unbearably high. Plan 9 and BeOS were very promising candidates but they failed just as quickly.

        Both Linux and Windows are extremely feature-complete at this point. I am yet to see a compelling argument for any other "different" O

        • My point is, AROS, MorphOS, or AnyOtherSuperCoolOS are just as irrelevant as AmigaOS or CPM are.

          Slashdot carries articles on all sorts of OSs (eg, AtheOS), and I'm sure that including ones that are far less used than AmigaOS or BeOS. I don't see these articles filled with "no one cares" type comments.

          Both Linux and Windows are extremely feature-complete at this point. I am yet to see a compelling argument for any other "different" OS on Intel hardware (I am not counting BSD which roughly falls into t

          • I'd say that same thing about MacOS too. Well... It's not x86, strictly speaking. I consider it a "niche" operating system, just like AIX, Solaris, and MVS. When/if Apple decides to port it to x86, we'll see how it goes. I'd say, MacOS has a chance to become a competitor to Linux and Windows.

            I guess Slashdot should stop covering anything other than Windows or Linux, since no one cares. Or come to that, why bother with Linux? Might as well go Windows-only. No, both would be an oversimplification of what

  • This is an emotional, post-modern exploration of our memories in a digital context. I am very moved indeed. This will, prehaps, give birth to an entire new genre of digital art, that of Graphical User Interface Nostalgic Fantasy. Perhaps we could open an exhibition at the Tate Modern [tate.org.uk]?
  • I'm just waiting in heated anticipation until the final Longhorn icons are posted as a Slashdot story!

    *shiver*
  • My favorite would be the ASL icon, saving me countless hours in adult.. err, friendly chat rooms.

  • Pre-release (SDK CD) AmigaOS4 icons (Score:4, Informative)

    by Mike Bouma ( 85252 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2004 @05:46PM (#8309545) Homepage
    At AmigaWorld Mason stated:

    Thanks for all this comments - the positive and the negative ones!

    They will hopefully help to make the next release more perfect.
    Your suggestions are allways appreciated!

    This is the icon set for the pre-release CD and nothing more!

    If you have a look a the older OS 3.9 preview screenshots you will notice that the design of the icons has changed in many points - the same with OS 4.

    Just wait for the next release... ;-)

    Kind Regards,
    Martin "Mason" Merz


    The AmigaOS4 Pre-Release/SDK will be available to all AmigaOne owners and is currently undergoing final beta-testing.

  • Amiga Features (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 17, 2004 @07:41PM (#8310885)
    Graphically, the icons kinda suck, but they are quite clear, a bit like KDE's, which is more than can be said for the "grayish gradient wash" approach of GNOME or the "ooh, see through" MacOSX.

    They're very 90s "newicons" amigaish, which is a look I always personally disliked, but they were undeniably friendly for beginners and people who just wanted to get stuff done and wanted recognisable icons instead of fashion statements.

    I'm more interested in the window borders - simple, clean, still distinctively amigaish.

    But what really struck me was all the stuff that I'd semi-forgotten about from the Amiga, that the amiga just plain did better than "modern" OSes. Look at the Devs window. Want to install a device driver? Put it in the Devs folder, and that's assuming you've got such crappy hardware that failed to include an amiga autoconfig rom with a built-in driver. Want to install a library? Libs folder. Want to read a new kind of multimedia data type? Get a DataType for it, put it in DataTypes folder, and even programs written before the invention of the data type have a fair chance of being able to handle it.

    I think it was the logical volumes ("assigns") that allowed the amiga to have a non-sucky system and application file/directory structure.

  • Mention of resurrection's of Amiga used to stir fond nostalgic memories tinged with not quite extinguished hope. Now decades later I just experience pathos.

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