amiga-news.de - Trevor Dickinson: status updates for Tabor, LibreOffice and Enhancer

13.Oct.2018

Trevor Dickinson: status updates for Tabor, LibreOffice and Enhancer
This weekend, the 20th edition of AmiWest is taking place in Sacramento (USA). As usual, there's a big presentation (Youtube) from Trevor Dickinson (A-EON), but for the first time in many years there's no presentation or quick appearance from a Hyperion spokesperson. The following is a summary of the most important topics discussed during the A-EON presentation.

Tabor / A1222

The hardware was shipped to developers in 2014, betatesters received their boards in 2015 - nobody expected the process to take that long. What's missing before the board can be released is the audio driver and a finalised AmigaOS 4 ISO containing said driver. Dickinson could not describe the audio driver's current status since an update from the developer working on it didn't reach him in time for the show. He estimates that the boards will ship somehwere in the first quarter of 2019.

LibreOffice

Just like last year, Dickinson didn't address LibreOffice during his presentation. Asked about the office suite's current status afterwards, he explains that Hans-Jörg Frieden has been working on the project for two years 'part time'. After releasing a first beta to the testers in 2017, Frieden realised that he was facing "insurmountable problems" in finishing the port - AmigaOS was missing too much functionality.

After that, it was decided to base the AmigaOS port on the new Android version of LibreOffice 5, in which many of the problems Frieden was facing had already been solved - meaning the developer had to start from scratch again. Dickinson estimates that a beta version of the new port could be released to testers in January.

Enhancer

Later this year, developers will get free access to a "Enhancer Software Essentials" package that contains the libraries, gadgets and classes distributed with Enhancer to have more applications use these new features.

A paid upgrade to Enhancer, "Enhancer 2", is in the works, details are listed in one of Dickinson's slides (see below). A free [we think, Amiga-News] "Enhancer Graphics Update Pack" will be released before that, containing updates of various drivers and graphics subsystems aswell as the graphics card drivers for Radeon cards using the Polaris chipset that were announced earlier this year.

A 'Classic' edition of Enhancer for AmigaOS 3 is in the works. Users that want to help betatest it are asked to contact A-EON using enhancersoftware@amiga.org. While talking about this edition, Dickinson also mentions that A-EON purchased the rights to MediaToolBox, the HDToolBox successor from AmigaOS 4.

Miscellaneous

At the beginning of his presentation, Dickinson jokingly mentions he didn't bring an "Audio Conversation Jammer" and asks attendees not to secretly record his conversations with other people.

A-EON is looking for developers willing to work on some of the applications that were acquired. Octamed, ImageFX and Aladdin 4D are mentioned as examples.

Asked about a modern web browser, Dickinson explains that he's hoping to get a "leightweight, webkit based" browser done. But this would have to wait at least until LibreOffice is released.

Slides

The following screenshots show the slides from Dickinson's presentation that were shown during the (low resolution) live stream:

(cg) (Translation: cg)

[News message: 13. Oct. 2018, 22:49] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]

< Next message

Prior message >