amiga-news.de - Fortnightly Q&A's mit Fleecy Moss

06.Jul.2003
AmigaWorld (ANF) Fortnightly Q&A's mit Fleecy Moss - Runde 14
Das englischsprachige Online-Magazin AmigaWorld hat die Folge 14 der zweiwöchentlichen Fragen und Antworten an und von Fleecy Moss, CTO bei AMIGA, Inc., veröffentlicht (Update, 15.03.2012, cg: Meldung um das eigentliche Interview ergänzt, da das ursprüngliche Dokument nicht mehr verfügbar ist):

1) ssolie: With the services based approach you are proposing, will an application be expected to query capabilities or will AmigaOS automatically adapt to the hardware itself or some hybrid of the two? Depending on the application, some may not appreciate having to query the OS every time they want to do something versus letting the OS adapt itself to the application and hardware environment.

Fleecy: In all multi component systems there will always be a per component capability and requirement set. Traditional static systems work on assumption which tends to give them superior performance as long as those assumptions are always true. In the world of today, we have a huge level of dynamism - smartphones, PDAs, consoles, tablets, desktops, servers, fat pipes, thin pipes, hardware acceleration, processor speed, screen size, input controls etc and you are faced with the problem of how to map these from the physical domain into the digital domain.

A service based architecture doesn't really affect this in implimentation since it is just a model. For example I could query the graphics service to find out if it supplies a vector service and if it does then I can chose to use it or not. This can be done dynamically by the application or can be done at install time, which is no different from the situation now where, if you assume that MUI is installed, and it isn't then your application won't work.

Thus you will still have different options as a developer - you can make use of services which themselves adapt on your behalf or you can do that yourselves. In either case, there is always going to be the same question, where does the responsibility lie? We want to offer choice so that the developer can make those decisions. A good example is the Ami2D scaling services of the AmigaDE. Some people use them and some people prefer to create resolution dependent graphic sets.

What is needed is a further level of abstraction, so that capabilities and requirements are managed transparently and that is coming on board now with such things as vectorisation and other descriptive formats that allow for interpretation based upon semantic information. That is something we are looking at but the more abstraction you have, the more resources are required to translate between the physical and digital domains.

Swings and roundabouts I'm afraid.

2) CodeSmith: Apple have made a big splash with their announcement of PPC970 "G5" systems. Is there going to be a "zico-2" spec for Amiga PPC970 systems, or are you giving vendors full control? any idea when we can expect PPC 970 Amigas (other than "after OS4.0")?

Fleecy: We do plan on having a 64 bit version of the AmigaOS but that is someway down the line. If a vendor approaches us with the necessary hardware then we will consider revising our timetable but we still have a lot of work to do for the 32 bit PPC AmigaOS4, such as actually releasing AmigaOS4.0. There are also a few interesting other 32 bit opportunities coming up that will have to weighed against a 64 bit desktop machine.

3) Quixote: Since AmigaOS4.0 will be on the CyberStormPPC first, I wonder whether it will include an update to the CyberStorm's FlashROM, that would permit booting from the CD? I understand that it was a feature intended for the CyberStorm, but it doesn't seem to work.

Fleecy: We do not intend to touch the CSPPC flashrom. Its internals are proprietary and besides, we are relying on it to bring the HW up first before AmigaOS4.0 takes over. Any changes we made might also damage the users ability to boot into AmigaOS3 as well.

If you have problems with the CSPPC Flashrom, perhaps an email to those who worked on it might reveal why it doesn't work or get them to add that functionality.

4) Miffy: I run AmigaDE on my desktop ( the one I am typing on now ) which has software on it that I have ported, that others have ported and the like. It runs the partypack update. What I want to know is how long before the next publically available ( non NDA ) update comes along from Amiga given I cannot get permission to enter into a new NDA with Amiga Inc right now ( because of company regulations and Im sure others are in this position too )?

Fleecy: We are reworking our NDA policy to make it consistent with industry practices for software licensing. In the meanwhile if special circumstances prevent you from agreeing to the licensing terms, you can contact us directly to determine how best we can meet your needs. Send an email to support@amiga.com.

5) Asemoon: I very much like the idea of being able to use animated GIFs as icons on the desktop with the introduction of Amiga OS3.9 and so will this feature stay available or maybe be enhanced/altered in any way for AmigaOS4? And will there be support for 24bit PNG format icons in the future?

Fleecy: The source code for that particular feature is in the hands of H&P and we do not have access to it.

The Amiga graphics architecture has reached the end of its useful life. Actually, it reached it about five years ago but has been brought back, jiggled, enhanced and hacked to stop the platform from dying. The screenshots you are seeing as part of the AmigaOS4.0 on Tour roadshow represent hopefully the last AmigaOS release that uses this architecture and their quality is a reflection of both the strength of the original architecture and the ingenuity and persistence of the developers since then who have worked on it.

As part of the Amiga Generation 2 project (AG2), we are currently working on a brand new visual domain replacement which we hope to deploy either in AmigaOS4.1 or AmigaOS4.2. This will build from the hardware upwards and be able to support high quality existing interface models as well as allow for brand new features, functionality and models. We are particularly eager to introduce the Reactive Presentation Agents (RPAs) that we developed for the AmigaDE which would provide the same functionality, and a lot more besides.

6) Asemoon: What languages will AmigaOS4 support out of the box?

Fleecy: We are supporting many languages, which are listed below, using a combination of the excellent ATO and private individuals, working in teams of two or more to produce each catalog. We do have a few offers where we just have one person (Icelandic and Malay) but we would like to have at least two people, since it is a lot of work. Anyone interested in helping out should send a mail to os4-betatest@hyperion-entertainment.com with the subject line of 'Localisation offer of help'.

Bosnian
Catalan
Czech
Danish
Dutch
Finnish
French
Galician
German
Greek
Hungarian
Italian
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Serbian
Slovenian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish

That's 20 languages for now.

The Russian ATO team disbanded but new people will soon be joining. I think we can count them as well.

This is a list of language drivers for which there are no catalogs currently in progress.

Albanian
Belarusian
Bulgarian
Croatian
Esperanto
Estonian
Faroese
Icelandic
Irish
Latvian
Lithuanian
Maltese
Portuguese-brazil
Romanian
Slovak
Ukrainian

If you are missing a language that can be written from left to right in an ISO-8859-X charset just ask Detlef at TetiSoft@apg.lahn.de if he can create a language driver for it.

7) Asemoon: The support for non-Latin fonts like for instance Arabic/Persian and Chinese/Japanese characters were not well documented for previous AmigaOS releases. How will such characters and languages be handled by future AmigaOS and AmigaDE releases?

Fleecy: Not well documented is too optimistic :) It was documented that the Amiga character set is ECMA-94 Latin1 (thats ISO-8859-1), that the bullet.library API uses Unicode (16bit only), and it was defined a font attribute FPF_REVPATH for writing from right to left. There was no official statement from H&P how their special localizations for e.g. czech or russian would fit into this framework (in fact they did not). There was a statement that the Euro update is only an intermediate solution.

OS4 bullet API was improved and allows 32bit Unicode now, 16bit are not enough since Unicode 3.2 (current is 4.0).

OS4 diskfont.library now contains a character set database, it does know the MIME charset name of each font in the system, and the Unicode code point of each glyph. However the bitmap fonts handled by diskfont.library are still limited to 8bit charsets, so for Chinese/Japanese/Persian/Georgian etc you'll have to use bullet API. With the new diskfont API you can however ask for e.g. Times in ISO-8859-5 (cyrillic), -6 (arabic), -7 (greek), -8 (hebrew), -11 (thai) or -16 (eastern european latin with Euro) and it will create it on-the-fly from e.g. a truetype font.

With OS4 locale.library the user is able to change the current system default charset on-the-fly by selecting a different language driver. The charset of each catalog file in the system is known, there exist charset conversion functions that ensure that e.g. for polish with ISO-8859-2 system default charset any polish catalog file will be displayed correct, it does not matter if its in ISO-8859-2, -16 or in the special ATO charset used in OS3.9 polish localization. Its also possible to use catalog files in UTF-8.

Most text handling and output functions in OS4 are not able to write from right to left, so there still exist large problems with arabic/persian and hebrew, an application that reverses arabic and hebrew strings before output can at least display its GUI but for text input (cursor on the right after return) special applications would be needed.

Summary: OS3.x language support was limited to western european latin languages, OS4.0 language support is limited to latin, cyrillic and greek (thai would eventually work if someone could fit thai glyphs into topaz/8 and topaz/9 default ROM fonts). OS4.0 font support is limited to any 8bit MIME charset in diskfont API (besides the right-to-left problem) and not limited in bullet API.

8) _Steve_: Will there be support for the pre-existing PPC programs from both PUP/WOS in OS4?

Fleecy: We'll provide an application launcher that can launch WarpUp programs, maybe even PowerUp. However, we'll not include any hacks to make this work. Since there was only a small number of applications created that used these two systems, we are hopefully that their authors will upgrade their programs and release AmigaOS4.0 native versions.

9) Billsey: From past personal experience I know that there are dedicated Christians at Amiga, Inc. I have friends there, and I am not turning against them, but they are Christian, so I believe that the following question(s) must be asked. I would like to know what role that faith has played (a) in keeping the company alive; (b) in walking the path that has been walked; and (c) when specific confession and, more importantly, repentance of “mistakes made” will be observable.

Fleecy: Religion, like any other philosophy seller is an individual concern, not something that should ever be part of heterogenous system, whether a group, a company, a nation or a species. I always find it ironic that nature, the mother of us all preaches diversity and yet humans are obsessed with monotony, to the point of coercion, persecution, discrimination and destruction.

With that in mind, I cannot and will not answer your question, because such things should be on individual level interaction. In other words, if you want an answer, send the question to the individuals themselves.

10) drstrange: what form of support will OS4 take for a 250MB ZIP? Will it use harddrive-like formatting or a mountfile and if a mountfile could you show us it ahead of time to give a few of us time to prep our disks.

Fleecy: Same as OS3.9 (or 3.1): it's a removable media, 'Removable' and 'Rigid Disk Block' are mutually exclusive, you should use a mountfile.

To be able to use RDBs on removable media as well all file systems would have to support unmounting. The new FFS2 does support it, but there are file systems which don't, for example SFS.

Some 3rd party devices do allow RDBs to be used on removable media, but that's a hack, it's not possible to implement it in clean way and therefore it will not be added to AmigaOS4.0 devices.

(Copyright © 2003 Amigaworld.net. All rights reserved.
Originally available at http://amigaworld.net/modules/fleecymoss/index.php?cat_id=15
You may freely redistribute this article, providing that a URL is provided to the original source,
and the copyright notices remain intact) (nba)

[Meldung: 06. Jul. 2003, 18:51] [Kommentare: 54 - 10. Jul. 2003, 09:54]
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