Say did you check out the new interface design concepts on the New Techniques website? They posted them around June 98. (http://www.newtekniques.com) Now that's some Workbench. Very cool, its the direction the Amiga needs to go in. I'm glad to see that the Amiga reanimator team is surveying all of computerdom for examples of best practice. That interface resonates with the look of MGI apps (http://www.mgisoft.com) and MetaCreations too. That nifty weblike navigator design resonates with the InXight (http://www.inxight.com) beyond GUI interface concept.

Good.

All this visual exuberance tells us that the Amiga Inc team has decided to dump the tired old "Amiga needs to look like a serious business machine" concept. I never did like the dull gray and blue color scheme of the 2.04 Operating System and beyond. I guess it was some designed challenged manager's, probably Gould's, idea of what serious colors were. Everybody else just thought they were dull. Besides what does 'business like' mean any more when business itself is radically changing from Industrial age to Information Age organizations. What's that all about Alfie?

Hey! We don't need another Micro$loth Start bar, cluttering up the Workbench, do we? I mean how goofy can Billy G get? What's in that Redmond coffee anyway? A lot more than Java is my guess. With Windoze you have to hit the Start bar to shut down the computer. To put it another way, start me up to shut me down. Duh! Clearly not all that intuitive. No the Amiga needs a more innovative approach than aping the Wintel system.

With the AI approach it looks like we are going to get an outstanding interface that truly matches the outstanding underlying operating system. This is good. That puts real action behind Jeff Schindler's words about building an Amiga that will be a great leap forward in computer innovation.

Pause. The audience shuffles their collective feet. A few clearings of throats......

Well alright, the possiblity of some action on AI's part. They do move at a rate second only to geology in statelieness.

But some might say, like the guy in the back over there, "Yes, but is it still an Amiga?"

"Great question", my smile curdles ...

I eyeball the geek. I'll bet he's just a techno-obstructionist, trying to ground to a halt all innovation to protect his investment in an A500 running OS 1.3 , that he bought at a garage sale six years ago for thirty bucks.

"Sure, well let's talk about it."....

When we say "It has an Amiga look and feel", what are we actually saying? Well, for starters, small, tightly coded apps come immediately to mind. Then there's fluid, integrated multitasking,
interprocess communications. And let's see, whimsical, graphics intensive, and of course, resource demand lite. In a word, often innovative, always creative.

These attributes when converted into programming practice lead to a conservation of resources programming ethic. And that I might add, is the sort of thinking behind explaining why your Amiga is so fast, so powerful, so able, and with so few hardware resources.

Think about it, the Amiga has the computational hitting power of an Airmobile Division (sort of a float like a butterfly, sting like a bee kind of thing) while your basic Wintel power hog has the lumbering sledge hammer hitting power of a Soviet Armored Division. Except for one thing, all the tanks are made by Yugo and Edsel. After all Win95 users have the benefit of spontaneous
crashes, broken apps, unexplained conflicts. (Maybe they got an X-Files thing going on over there.)

To show you just how screwed up the boys in Redmond are, its a Win98 selling point that the upgrade fixes 3,000 bugs in Win95. Excuse me, but why are there 3,000 bugs in Win95 in the first place? All the versions of the Amiga OS never had 3,000 bugs combined. It must be part of that freedom to innovate thing that Billy G talks about as the defining point in his fight with the
Department of Justice.

That's not the end of it, nosireebob! After the boys in Microsoft's Operating Systems Division have chugged a bunch of bloatware bytes into their new creation, nothing lo-cal here, then the Apps guys lumber in. All the Wintel apps belly up to the digital donut shop and bloat up in response. "Hey! You got any more glazed ones back there?" The Wintel programmers are gonna wear out a lot of Jane Fonda exercise videos if they ever want to slim down to the range of the svelte Amiga operating system and apps.....

"One two, and one two, and one two, and stretch. Can you feel it burning?" Say is that Steve Ballmer I see puffing away over there on the left? Go Big Guy!

Did you ever realize that all that bloatware costs you money? All that bloatware needs more heavy metal to run. 32 megs are a minimum to run with a Win98 set-up. Then we need more processing speed just to speed up all the Big Boy bloatware code so that it executes at a reasonable speed. 32 megs on an Amiga? Nirvana. Isn't it interesting how my A3000 with its stock 030 CPU boots up so much faster than my Wintel 586 CPU @ 120 mz running Win98? It isn't all that faster with a Pentium II either.

Now, before we Amigoids get all puffed out, shaking our tail feathers about how great we are, we should remember that all this Amiga Uber Alles chauvinism hype can blind us to truly genuine innovations that occur on other platforms. For instance all that Amiga look and feel stuff we were considering a few moments ago, you know, the small, tightly coded apps, that stuff?, well you can find it elsewhere. These fine attributes also characterize apps on several other platforms as well. For instance Wav (http://www.dharbor.com) running on Java, a fine modular Web-centric word processor, or most any app on the late lamented Newton, and heaven forbid, even some apps on Wintel, the Great Satan itself; apps from MGI (http://www.mgi.com), MetaCreations, and the Opera browser. Think about it, Bryce 3D from MetaCreations acts more like an Amiga app than Videoscape 3D, an early Amiga program, ever did.

To keep us humble we should remember that from time to time Amiga programmers have blown it.

Blown it big time.

The greatest failure of the Amiga developer community has been to let the sub $500USD digital video market slip off the platform over on to Wintel. Now I mean $500 total, hardware and software included. There are no sub $100 NLE (non-linear editors) that run on the Amiga. There are no video digitizers, complete with onboard rock solid sync sound, in the $200 range that run on the Amiga.

Impossible?

Well actually not, on the dreaded Wintel, I can put together a very capable digital video post-production system for around $500US complete. Here's what I would get. Winnov's (http://www.winnov.com) Vidium AV digitizer, let's see, that's $199. Then MGI (http://www.mgi.com) makes VideoWave II, a NLE for $89. Check. Cosmigo has Promotion. a PC DPaint clone, for $35. If you're really interested I could even throw in a few alternatives. How about the Pinnacle VideoDirector 400 @ $199US for both the digitizer and the NLE? Yes there is choice in this price range. And this stuff is selling like hotcakes.

Hello! Isn't this Amiga territory?

Why is this? How did this happen? After all a prime characteristic of the Amiga user community can be summed up in the observation, People make things with the Amiga. I mean just look at the mods and anim collection on the Aminet. Amiga is the home of the garage media developer.

Now to get back to digital video editing.

Sure, there are lots of good Amiga editing solutions. From Newtek, the Flyer will roost in your editing nest if you're ready to plunk down ten grand for everything. Now 10K is a bargain if you're comparing the Flyer to a 3/4 inch editing system, remember them? 3/4 inch too obsolete for your tastes? Oh alright at 10K the Flyer is a bargain when compared to a Beta SP post set-up. But who cares? That's not the true garage gear that the wild eyed developers use. True, Vidium digitized footage wouldn't make the grade at Babylon 5. Not broadcast quality! But again, who cares? It looks great on the Web. It's Webcast quality.

A sub one grand digital video editing system is the equivalent of Super 8 film for the nineties and beyond. But its oh so much better. At a 1K and under price point these systems are tractor beams bringing in hobbyists, independent media artists, mods makers, demo makers, gungho high school students who stay up for 57 hours straight to finish a demo just to impress their friends, home moviemakers, and very importantly web and multimedia developers. None of them either have a Beta SP rig sitting around in their garage or are interested in an equivalent, all theirs for a mere $10,000USD. They are interested in vmail, streaming video on the Web, and CD-ROM production with DVDs closing fast. They could care about broadcast quality. Yes, you can do it for under a grand on Wintel but not on the Amiga. So let's not be so smug Amigoids. Better yet let's not let it happen again. Even better let's develop a killer $500 system for the Amiga.

So where does all this pontificating lead us to? Hopefully to several conclusions.

The Amiga can be the most innovative computer platform in the world for the early years of the next Millenimum. After all there is very little past baggage to overcome. Jean Louis Gassee once
said to me' "All operating systems become cancerous with age." (See http://tech-head.com/persona4.htm)

Well he's right.

Lean, modular, tightly coded operating systems, like the Amiga's, have less of a problem in the first place. In this regard an open system has a great advantage. It can evolve. An open system is
a co-evolutionary system that can move forward, interacting with all the best computing concepts no matter where they were invented.

As the Amiga comes back from the cyberdead, it must reach out to like minded thinking on other platforms. For example, a Java Virtual Machine is a must. AI should take the lead, programming
one themselves, if the lagging Merapi and MOca projects keep slipping. Amiga must embrace all open standards. It should be universal data I/O, with unique applications on the platform. USB, we need it. The is a war for eyeballs going on out there in cyberspace and the Amiga needs to be aware. (http://tech-head.com/eyewar1.htm)

In the end what the phrase 'Amiga look and feel' is really all about comes down to six values. They are imagination, innovation, connecting, resource conservation, empowerment, and value. In spite of occasional missteps (putting "Ghoul" and "Muddy" in charge of a billion dollar a year computer company, comes immediatly to mind) the Amiga implements these six values better than any other computational environment.

So we have our first indications, with those concept models of the new Amiga interface, that Amiga Inc is on the right track and is moving the Amiga forward once again to the forefront of computing.

Be Seeing You.

But before you go......

PS: A Note Regarding My Amiga Perspective.

Many of you might wonder why I am writing these communiques. Read on.

I have been an Amiga user for almost a decade. Scarcely a day goes by that I don't use my Amigas for some task important to my work or enjoyment. As a active digital cinema maker I care about my tools. I care about the Amiga a great deal. The Amiga plays important roles in many of these projects. You can follow my explorations of a theory of Digital Cinema at http://tech-head.com/cinema.htm.

I have co-developed Tech Head Stories (http://tech-head.com/) in part as a web site for garage digital filmmakers, garage multimedia developers, and for examining the context that encourages these efforts, as well as those interested in paradigmatic change, and the stories that we all weave to make sense of it all.

The more I work with Macs and Wintel, the more I am impressed with the robustness, elegance, simplicity, and convenience of the Amiga OS. It is very good. Multitasking matters. So does Arexx. Did you ever try to do batch processing or make a macro in Photoshop? Say no more.

For me, the appeal of the Amiga is it's sense of whimsey coupled with its status as an artistic hacker's machine. For over a decade the Amiga has fired the imagination of artists, independents, hackers, and those that make up the leading edge of things. It invites imaginative development of art, animation, music, multimedia, communication, and software. The Amiga as a low cost, high performance machine, flexible, and alive with possibility, has aided their efforts greatly.

As efforts to breath new life into this tradition evolve, upon these cyberpages, I will be present with commentary and analysis, presenting a map charting another road ahead.

Thank you,

Roger B. Wyatt

Remember when you need analysis and insight.... Check the Tek.