Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!usc!rutgers!cbmvax!peter
From: peter@cbmvax.commodore.com (Peter Cherna)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: A3000 questions and comments
Message-ID: <13767@cbmvax.commodore.com>
Date: 13 Aug 90 15:48:59 GMT
References: <4E470D12BFBF40044C@ISUVAX.BITNET>
Reply-To: peter@cbmvax (Peter Cherna)
Organization: Commodore, West Chester, PA
Lines: 80

In article <4E470D12BFBF40044C@ISUVAX.BITNET> BARRETT@OWL.ECIL.IASTATE.EDU (Marc Barrett) writes:
>>   What happened to all that talk on the net a while back about Commodore
>hiring the author of GPRINT to do a new & vastly improved printer.device
>(and printer drivers) for AmigaOS2.0?  Has Commodore decided to can that,
>too?

Hmm.  That would be me.  I did write GPrint, but I wasn't hired to do
any printer work.  I was hired to do user-interface work, such as
the Gadget Toolkit, parts of Preferences, Workbench, and Intuition.
(BTW, GPrint is only as good as it is because it's not general, i.e.
it's tied to a specific printer, a small subset of resolutions,
doesn't support color or scaling, etc.  It just happens that the small
subset of features I supported meets a lot of needs.  If you twiddle
the printer preferences, you can get almost the same result (seriously).)

>   This is starting to get rediculous.  One by one, most of the features
>that Commodore said were "in there" with respect to AmigaOS 1.4 have
>been eliminated from AmigaOS2.0.  First the structured fonts, then the
>improved speech synthesis, and now the printer support.  Has Commodore
>improved anything in AmigaOS besides the Workbench?

"Outline fonts in 2.0" was one of the better rumors that went around.
(we do have scalable bitmap fonts in 2.0, so some confusion stems from
that).  Sad thing about rumors is that they aren't always true.  The
improved speech IS in 2.0, and was added after Beta 5.  I'm not familiar
with any printer enhancements that were "promised" for 2.0.

There are lots of other improvements in 2.0 that run considerably
deeper than Workbench.  As a quick and incomplete list:

	Gadget Toolkit (easier and more standard user interfaces)
	New look
	Many extensions to Workbench
	Support for oversize screens
	Direct overscan support
	Productivity and Hedley-mode support in Intuition
	Bitmap-scaled fonts
	DOS commands rewritten in C, smaller with more features
	Standard file and font requesters
	Console cut-and-paste
	Improved shell, including implicit cd, backtick (see below)
	Completely rewritten and extended Preferences
	DOS library converted to C with many useful extensions
	FFS in ROM
	RAM is faster

I thought I'd explain shell-backtick as the "feature-of-the-week".
If you put a command in backticks (reverse apostrophe, if you like),
then it will be executed, and the result will be placed in the
original command line.  For example, if you have a program called
"foo" in your path, but you forget where, but you'd like to copy
it to df0:, in 1.3, you would do:

You:    which foo
Amiga:  DH0:mytools/foo
You:    copy DH0:mytools/foo df0:

Under 2.0, you can say:

You:    copy `which foo` df0:

And poof!

>   Ever since developers started getting their beta 2.0 releases, I've
>been hearing "you're gonna love it" from all of them.  But, the more
>I keep hearing about it, the more certain I am that I am gonna hate
>it.

I still think you will like it.  But if you believe too deeply in various
rumor sources, of course you'll be disappointed.  When you were five,
Santa Claus was a rumor.

>                                -MB-

     Peter
--
     Peter Cherna, Software Engineer, Commodore-Amiga, Inc.
     {uunet|rutgers}!cbmvax!peter    peter@cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com
My opinions do not necessarily represent the opinions of my employer.
"This is a one line proof...if we start sufficiently far to the left."