@captainmoomoo

Great job! wish I was taking your class.

Plaz

@captainmoomoo

Well done. A most exciting idea!


@cecilia

I spent many, many hours using DPaint. The animation capabilities continuously amazed me, i.e. Zoom in from the left (small) flip and enlarge and stop at center screen for all to see while in a moving star field! Sigh!

For all the time I spent on it I always felt there was much more and I was just scratching the surface.

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@thread

My only concern would be a lack of documentation for the students to reference: the RKMS are near impossible to source and need updating anyway.

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MindSpace: MindMaps and UML diagrams for OS4

We ran 5 Recursion Computer Fairs before hitting the exit condition

Deleted

Last edited by Restore2003 on 14-May-2005 at 06:32 PM.

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Quote:

BobC. wrote: @cecilia I spent many, many hours using DPaint. The animation capabilities continuously amazed me, i.e. Zoom in from the left (small) flip and enlarge and stop at center screen for all to see while in a moving star field! Sigh! For all the time I spent on it I always felt there was much more and I was just scratching the surface.

i loved it when i was teaching it to my students and naturally I thought (HA!) that I had tried every combination of tools possible.

well, my eyes bugged out when i saw a student try something i hadn't done. that is SO cool.
plus, it's great when you have a really talented student and you show them a few things and they just run with it!
i forgot his name right now, but I know that kid will be the next "Pixar" success story. honestly!

_________________
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That's the only God that I know exists." Terry Gilliam

The RKRMs are available on the Amiga Developer CD 2.1, and anybody who wants them should go out and buy it. amigakit.com have it in stock for £20, and I don't think it has ever been more expensive so there is no excuse. It also contains a load of other developer info, inlcuding some historic stuff which is probably more interesting than useful, but usually still relevant.

Chris

(@Restore2003 - thanks)

Last edited by Chris_Y on 14-May-2005 at 06:51 PM.

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@ Captainmoomoo

"It's only when they come to do their third year dissertations that we'd then move them over to either AmigaOne's or WinUAE PCs."

Question, is develping with an emulator a good idea ? UAE is good but using an emulator might bring some errors that don't really exist right? In general it makes more sense to use the real thing you're develping for. I'm not saying this just by myself it's also what I've heard experienced developers say. Get those A1's I tell ya

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José

@captainmoomoo

Quote:

The work could be carried out on a WinUAE PC running OS3.x, and the results of the project could then later be modified as necessary for compilation on OS4. That could be a cheap way of getting things started. I also have a certain amount of money in my computing budget, and if I can justify it, I might even be able to get my department to fork out for a uA1...

I'd certainly like to see something like OpenOffice ported. If you and your class could get it working on OS3.x, it would be a much easier job to port it to OS4.

Dave M.

@captainmoomoo

GREAT news to read! :)
I hope all go well!
Some projects to port?

- GTK library(and then mozilla, TheGimp, etc, etc :)
- Some nice and intuitive image viewer
- Use FLTK from Max Tretene to port fastly some apps...
- etc etc etc :)

GOOD WORK!

Tuxedo.

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@captainmoomoo

Please keep us posted on how things go when you tell your students that they are to work on Amiga programs !! I'm realy realy curious about their reactions when you tell them

I cant believe your boss gave you the go-ahead on this project, I would have expected a reaction like: 'WHAT, are you crazy ? Teaching those kids to program on a non existant platform ?'

I hope all goes well for you (and us )

Thanks !

Martin

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@Chris_Y

Quote:

The RKRMs are available on the Amiga Developer CD 2.1, and anybody who wants them should go out and buy it

Agreed, but students prefer to not spend cash if they can: ie borrow texts from libraries and the rkrms still need to be updated for OS4.

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MindSpace: MindMaps and UML diagrams for OS4

We ran 5 Recursion Computer Fairs before hitting the exit condition

Quote:

yoodoo2 wrote: @Chris_Y Quote: The RKRMs are available on the Amiga Developer CD 2.1, and anybody who wants them should go out and buy it Agreed, but students prefer to not spend cash if they can: ie borrow texts from libraries and the rkrms still need to be updated for OS4.

Perhaps hyperion could help out?

_________________
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Hey everyone, sorry I was not around during the weekend. The nearby school switches off it's proxy server on the weekends, so I was unable to access the net (from my nearby bedroom)...

Anyway, here are a few replies:

@Jose

Quote:

Question, is develping with an emulator a good idea ? UAE is good but using an emulator might bring some errors that don't really exist right? In general it makes more sense to use the real thing you're develping for. I'm not saying this just by myself it's also what I've heard experienced developers say. Get those A1's I tell ya

I appreciate that, but if we get a no go from our department on buying those A1's, then I don't see that we have much choice.

@Tuxedo

Quote:

GREAT news to read! :) I hope all go well! Some projects to port? - GTK library(and then mozilla, TheGimp, etc, etc :) - Some nice and intuitive image viewer - Use FLTK from Max Tretene to port fastly some apps... - etc etc etc :)

Thanks for the suggestions! Whether we get those A1's or not, we will definitely be offering 5 or six projects to the students. I need more ideas on what should
be ported. It would be preferable if the suggestions I receive are realistic, and within the scope of what a
3rd year uni student would be generally capable of. I like Tuxedo's suggestion of the GTK library - made me think that
perhaps that's where we should be aiming, at porting widely used open source libraries which would make further
application porting much easier.

@Metalheart

Quote:

I cant believe your boss gave you the go-ahead on this project, I would have expected a reaction like: 'WHAT, are you crazy ? Teaching those kids to program on a non existant platform ?'

Well I must say I presented it really well for him, "very efficient and promising new OS," "runs amazingly fast on
*very* modest hardware..." etc. He was sold on the idea immediately!

@yoodoo2
Quote:

My only concern would be a lack of documentation for the students to reference: the RKMS are near impossible to source and need updating anyway.

a serious concern of mine too...

@captainmoomoo @Tuxedo

Whole heartedly agree with porting development libraries (as a base). While not the most visually stimulating of tasks, there is a lot to be said for the design and architecture of some of those libraries and they do provide a somewhat "cross platorm" launchpad for other ports or development for your students... and us. As with anything educational based, its good to make sure that you're reenforcing "good practices" as opposed to bad or lazy practices (which I suppose is open to interpretation). Just because its popular doesn't mean its architecturally sound... just look at Windows!

Cheers!

@yoodoo2

I'm sure the university can stretch to a few CDs for students to reference/borrow if they are buying AmigaOnes. Also remember that the AutoDocs - which are the most important and up-to-date resource - come with every OS4 SDK anyway.

There are probably libraries that still have copies of the original RKRMs as well.

I believe Hyperion were planning on updating the books but I suspect actually coding the OS has higher priority.

Chris

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@captainmoomoo

... get the A1 from GuruMeditation, see the recent news item.

Hi everyone, I got a reply back from that person I mailed. Here it is:

Quote:

Dear Piyush Sorry for not replying earlier as I had a very busy week so far. I think it is a very good idea and many students will find it interesting and useful. Regarding the funding, all I know of is something called "college teaching fund", this is decided per school, last year our school submitted a proposal for a e-learning math based server and it was not successful. The deadline for such funding is in March so long time to wait. I suggest to email Lakmal, may the division is interested to fund such a project since the kits are not so expensive. I will be around tomorrow if you want to discuss this further. Best regards. Fatin

OK, so here is the email I've constructed so far to Lakmal, our head of division (not the head of dept, the guy I soke to last time).

Quote:

Dear Lakmal, As per the email below, Fatin has suggested that I contact you with regards to securing some money from the college teaching fund. I am interested in ordering some software development kits for a new and promising operating system called AmigaOS4. Here's why... As you will probably be aware, most of the projects being offered in the Electronics Department are pretty much either DSP, or communications based, with practically nothing in software - even though, with two years of C/C++/software design, one would believe that programming is a very important skill that the students are acquiring from our degree programmes. Therefore I am hoping to offer about 5 or 6 third year projects for the coming session, all software based. The projects will involve the porting of various libraries/applications over to this new OS - AmigaOS4. AmigaOS is a very powerful, but streamlined and efficient OS which runs extremely well on *very* modest hardware requirements by today's standards. Unfortunately, as it is brand new, it doesn't have any of the basic applications an OS needs in order to survive. The projects I am going to offer will tackle this problem, as they will involve porting some key open source applications/libraries to the new OS. This will allow students to apply the knowledge they have acquired in my lectures to a real-life programming problem, in an environment with modest computing power, thereby forcing them to develop solutions that are as efficient as possible. They will also learn the basics of what is required when one ports from one OS to another, as well as develop a knowledge of the workings of the source and destination operating systems. A fully configured development kit costs in the region of about £900, which includes all the hardware and software necessary for us to start work immediately. I would hope that we could purchase at least 2 or 3 such kits. How would I go about making a proper application, and what do you think are the chances that this money would be released? Regards, Piyush

I haven't yet sent this out as I want feedback and suggestions on how I could improve the email to increase our chances of getting a positive result.

@captainmoomoo

Sound bonzer to me

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@captainmoomoo

I think the following line needs to be rethought. It sounds too risky, like it is on the brink of dying. Mentioning it is a new OS is fine, but mentioning anything like survival may raise some doubt.

Quote:

it doesn't have any of the basic applications an OS needs in order to survive.

I would word it as something like that it offers a unique oportunity for students to make a real world impact on an up and comming OS. That way it sounds a bit more optomistic rather than it might not survive.

*Very* good news...

Being a student finishing my two-year IT degree, I know the influence of what you learnt at the university on what will be your OS & programming language of choice...
Just look at how much M$ spend on various university sponsoring actions, "Microsoft certification" etc...

I especially agree about one point: it makes a fantastic motivation for students to have their work rewarded in the community. I often think : "yeah...I could try to code this for Linux...oh, already exists...what a shame." In our small and a bit dead community, the single piece of software you release and you hear: "THANK YOU!". Realy priceless.

Captainmoomoo, if you manage to make a good course, you'll also somehow solve for your students the problem of lack of documentation on the net. For Linux, you find hundreds of tutorials and complete docs, for AmigaOS, you have some sparse and *old* docs in different places...really discouraging, I can tell you.

This is really a wonderful action you're doing. Please stay in touch and push your students to share their work on the net!