Amiga Development Strategy

Where to place development effort:

1. There should certainly be some effort put into bringing the Amiga up- to-date in those areas where Windows-NT has gone ahead, but this should not be the major effort. Largely the areas are at the knowledge level (i.e. content and application areas) rather than at the lower (technical) levels. But see below for details.

2. There should also be effort put into improving current facilities, along the lines of enhancing true usability and usefulness. See below for details.

3. But I believe the main effort should be in developing the Amiga in directions that are not being taken bu Windows-NT at present. This is because if we merely focus on the two above then non-Amiga owners will have no reason for even considering the Amiga, let alone buying it. We need to develop unique selling points and sustaining and feeding and growing niche markets.

Where to place application effort:

• Serious (incl. professional) Video, because the Amiga is ideal for this, and also still has this market.
• Home video editing etc. because this is a market that could be reshaped by awareness raising - e.g. many take holiday videos, but do not even considering adding titles.
• Presentations (various kinds) - because of the Amiga's (1200) superb flexibility and transportability.
• Public information - because of successes like London transport Museum.
• Lecturing aids etc. - because of the growing tendency in academia to look towards technical aids to teaching, and the Amiga's proven track record here.
• Any applications in which movement and dynamism is central, rather than a mere sequence of statics - because the Amiga was built for movement and animation while the PC etc. were not and struggle with it. Quality and smoothness etc. score here.
• As well as some effort keeping the Amiga near the front as a general personal machine. But not trying to be number one in this area, as C= foolishly sometimes hoped to do.

Where to place marketing effort:

• Not in the Amiga-aware press, as C= did., but in the general press and media.
• Not trying merely to foster 'image' (as C= did with their 'We're No. 2' campaign and their 'To be this good will take Sega ages') but to explain unique features and explain their importance and the possibilities.
• Not to treat the Amiga as a commodity product (as did C=, who merely wished to shift boxes) but to treat it as an effect product, in to-be-grown markets.
• Not to try to muscle in on the already-overcrowded PC market but to focus on specific vertical application areas e.g. video, e.g. presentations, e.g. proximal user interfaces.
• Not to try a market tentatively for 6 months and then pull out because costs are not recouped in that time (as C= did with e.g. their multimedia push or their CAD push or their CDTV) but plan for a sustained and long term effort over say 5 years.

Bringing the Amiga up to date

Technical

• Add networking in an integrated manner. e.g. Incorporate AmiTCP as a standard part, but add to it an extremely user-friendly configurer. Add AWeb as standard since it is so configurable even for low memory usage and also has the same look and feel as most other Amiga software. And it's *fast* and elegant and usable, in line with Amiga culture.
• Add wizard facilities. And standard help facilities. So that we don't need to write our own. Not just make links to AmigaGuide possible but provide a way to make links *easy*.
• Add 24-bit colour as standard even if not on all models - as a standard that detects the availabllity of 24-bit hardware.

Non-technical:

The question is: how is the Amiga going to catch up here? GW2K needs a strategy for this. While we must accept that the PC will always (for the foreseeable future) have far more of this type of thing than the Amiga, there needs to be a strategy to handle it because the situation is no longer as it was in the 1980s, when the emphasis was on generic (knowledge- free) software; today it is increasingly on knowledge-based software.

I can see three possible types of strategy (not incompatible, and I think that it might be wise to follow all three to a lesser extent than focus only on one):

• Continue encouraging applications software developers to develop for the Amiga as well as for the PC etc. Set in place the incentives needed for a sustained movement to the Amiga, not just short-lived incentives or pressure.
• Set in place the development tools and support lines for Amiga people to develop their own applications packages, including a mechanism for getting those of better quality to a wide distribution. I think that we already have this in Aminet etc. but it needs fostering and especially the major sections in Aminet need to be geared towards application areas as well as types of software.
• Market the Amiga not as the one computer that people have but as the additional computer, that links with their PC and extends its range of usefulness, complementing it rather than (at present) supplanting it. In the hope that gradually a proportion of people will gradually perform more and more on their Amiga and less and less on their PC. For this we need to provide as standard excellent links to the PC.

Things not to be added

• Virtual memory: do NOT build this in at the bottom layers of the AmigaOS cos doing so is likely to jeopardise the important elegance and speed and efficiency that the Amiga already has. See important facilities that must be retained - especially we must retain the easy close-down (namely just switch off when all disk activity has finished) and fast start up.
• Memory protection: While it is important on machines where programmers are lazy and have come to rely on memory protection, on multi-user machines, and on machines that take ages to close down and re-boot, these are not true of the Amiga. While memory protection should be available as a standard option, able to be switched on and switched in when necessary, it should not be placed down in the depths of AmigaOS.
• Multi-user facilities (Unix-like) including user-ownership of files etc. Since the Amiga is not in that area. If we are going to have this then it should leap-frog the current ideas, into non-hierarchical ownerships.

Improving what we have

2. Add standard facilities for colour handling, such as standard library calls to remap bitmap colours, translate HSV to RGB, spread colours, add and subtract colours, etc. Surely there's already something like this available somewhere?

3. Add standard facilities for handling bitmaps such as rotate, blur, apply various transformations, etc. This could be along the lines of the maths libraries, and could detect and make use of any graphics hardware available such as DSP but could perform these without it.

4. The CLI shell. It should have, as menus, the ability to capture to a file all the text that flows through it. e.g. When I use telnet I wish to capture the text that flows off the top.

5. Extend the dual-playfield concept to allow thicker playfields (8 planes deep), and the ability to plug in new playfields (hardware additions) a bit like adding items to a SCSI chain. This would be hugely useful for e.g. CAD layers and GIS layers as well as for the next generation of games.

6. Links to PC. As standard should come a cable and software to link the Amiga to the PC. e.g. Twinepxress or Gemini.

Important Characteristics the must be Retained

• Elegance of AmigaOS
• Openness of AmigaOS, at all levels from hardware-hitting upwards.
• Efficiency of AmigaOS.
• Speed of AmigaOS.
• Flexibility of AmigaOS such as datatypes, libraries, devices, and also SetFunction().
• Fast booting (startup)
• Easy switch-off without having to shut down.
• Dual user interfaces (CLI and WB)
• Dual playfield
• Separable bitplanes
• Visual simplicity of WB user interface (e.g. menu bars hidden till needed)
• Others.