@yoodoo2

Quote:

Work has begun on putting together a guide to programming under OS4.

Very good.

There are also some discussions about a user documentation. Let's build the best documentation ever



@Thread

The OOo dev is already aware of many information provided in this thread and he is in contact with Amiga developers too.

As you'll understand that it is a huge job, do not expect something for tomorrow
Just cross your fingers...

Last edited by elwood on 12-May-2010 at 09:28 PM.

_________________
Philippe 'Elwood' Ferrucci
Sam460 1.10 Ghz
AmigaOS 4 betatester
Amiga Translator Organisation

@opi

Yes, a good guide would be a very valuable asset. His experiences are a good guide of where the difficulties are. However, I disapprove of his desire to use emacs or vim; those are horrible editors. The "Notepad" icon is displayed very clearly in the amidock for anyone who needs a basic text editor.

Hans

_________________
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https://keasigmadelta.com/ - More of my work.

@opi

I agree. More docs are needed for just about every aspect. And
they need to be aimed at the newbie, with more in-depth and esoteric
discussions in separate chapters/volumes.

The problem I see is having programmers write the docs. Their perspective
is such, that what is common knowledge to them, is a complete mystery to
someone just walking in the door.

The next problem is that printed docs are not cheap and, Catch 22; How do
you get everything up and running to get online if you have to get online
to get everything up and running?

Sept. 2009 The law suits ended. To much energy and money went to other
than development. I'm reasonably certain all involved with OS4 and it's
various aspects are aware of what is needed and most probably have yet
another map to guide their steps. All it takes is time and money.

I'm not saying 'Wait till it's done'. This thread is good.

----------------- Speaking of a Catch 22 --------------

I purchased win98 SE2 shortly after it came out. My wife's sewing machine
software required it. I put the CD in the drive and without too much hassle
that virus installed itself on the HD, in about 2 hours + restart, restart,
restart...... When finished, it installed everything except a CD driver. It
would even ask you to put the win98 cd in, to perhaps load a printer driver
for example, and would not recognize it because no driver was installed.

If you didn't know how to find/install/configure a CD driver under DOS,
you were simply SOL. That was the last version of winanything in this house.

@opi

Quote:

opi wrote: I had this argument with many people on this board. My claim was that AmigaOS4 is not intuitive and we think it is because we have +20 years of experience with it. People said OS4 is easy, understandable, have clear file system structure and so on. Today I came across link to report on porting efforts of Open Office 4 Kids. http://wiki.ooo4kids.org/index.php/EnvironmentSetup/AmigaOS As you can see someone able to be part of OO4K team (we can assume he's computer literate) has hard time grasping AmigaOS. That does not surprise me at least, but maybe this one data point (totally nonscientific in terms of usability study) will give some fans idea that you can't just assume that AmigaOS is somehow superior for a user/developers with no Amiga background.

Hiya,

That link makes interesting reading. It tells us more than just the fact that OS4 is confusing to an non-Amiga user (which is expected to a degree), it shows what a pain in the ass it is to develop/port a major software package over to OS4 using the current Amiga hardware and developer tool-set....this is obviously a bad thing for OS4 development going forward and is something that Hyperion/A-Eon should be looking at resolving quickly.

As to the 'user--friendliness' of OS4 itself to a new user, this was targeted (to some degree) by the 4.1.1 update which was itself driven from that SAM /OS4.1 review done last year by a new user. This is good in as far as Hyperion at least recognize it as an issue for the platform going forward.

Last edited by NovaCoder on 13-May-2010 at 01:58 AM.
Last edited by NovaCoder on 13-May-2010 at 01:18 AM.
Last edited by NovaCoder on 13-May-2010 at 12:37 AM.
Last edited by NovaCoder on 13-May-2010 at 12:37 AM.

@vidarh

Quote:

I have a server that I could set up a wiki on if there's interest. I'd also be happy to help read through and revise things (and test the various advice - I'm still coming to terms with the Amiga platform again :) )

A wiki with a user-guide to AmigaOS would be extremely excellent! I haven't used an Amiga myself in almost 15 years, and I'm pretty sure I could use the help when I buy my AmigaOne-X1000.

_________________
Even if my posts don't reflect it, I promise you I AM a developer.

@NovaCoder

The problems is that some of the configuration scripts requiter a full installed Linux system, way can't developers write simple makefiles anymore, way do you need bison, ccmake, automake and autoconfigure, Pearl, Python, and x,y,z package managers to check for dependency's.

Even compiling Linux programs for windows, requires cygwin for cross compiling.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 13-May-2010 at 02:42 PM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 13-May-2010 at 02:14 AM.

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@opi

"My idea is to ease teething pains of new developers, especially when they came from different OSes. "

respect +1

_________________
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// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
//
// Thing that I should find more time for: CC64 - 64bit Community Computer?

The problems that this guy is having aren't because AOS4 is not intuitive, but because the environment is not well configured for porting apps. The SDK needs to contain complete accessible documentation for the API. It should also include or clearly point to tools to make porting of apps from other platforms (particularly Linux or UNIXes) easier. GeekGadgets used to contain most of these tools. The automatic configuration tools have problems, but they do make it easier to set up a package to be portably compiled on various Linux/UNIX environments and therefore are the normal way of doing things in a FOSS environment. The requirements to the automatic configuration tools are generally things that every UNIX environment should have present. Sure AmigaOS 4.x is not a UNIX environment, but giving developers access to these tools (which are generally very powerful and useful in their own right) will make porting apps easier and encourage development under AmigaOS 4.x.

@Hans

Quote:

Hans wrote: Yes, a good guide would be a very valuable asset. His experiences are a good guide of where the difficulties are. However, I disapprove of his desire to use emacs or vim; those are horrible editors. The "Notepad" icon is displayed very clearly in the amidock for anyone who needs a basic text editor.

I personally like emacs and vi. I find them to be excellent editors for doing programming. I started using emacs on a DEC-20 in 1985 and the only other editor that I have ever found to be of comparable quality for programming is vi. Even on my first Amiga, an A1000, I used an editor like emacs for those kinds of editing tasks.

Last edited by frotz on 13-May-2010 at 07:21 AM.

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@vidarh
Quote:

I have a server that I could set up a wiki on if there's interest. I'd also be happy to help read through and revise things (and test the various advice - I'm still coming to terms with the Amiga platform again :) )

That would be great. Don't know how much interest/participation would be at first but having something setup could attract more people later. Your own experience of what do you miss or find confusing at first, both as user and as developer, will be valuable.

@MrFancyPants
Quote:

A wiki with a user-guide to AmigaOS would be extremely excellent! I haven't used an Amiga myself in almost 15 years, and I'm pretty sure I could use the help when I buy my AmigaOne-X1000.

Having a wiki with a part for general use and another for developers then? In the former we can explain usage of, for example, Preferences, and explaining the FS structure, how to work with the shell, what are Amiga icons and tooltypes and stuff like that. In the later, well, what tools are available as default for developing in/for AmigaOS, what others are availabl for download, replacements for the defaults ones (KCon, other shells, editors, etc), and what would be needed to port still.

Last edited by emeck on 13-May-2010 at 07:19 AM.
Last edited by emeck on 13-May-2010 at 07:15 AM.

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@NovaCoder

Quote:

is something that Hyperion/A-Eon should be looking at resolving quickly.

What exactly?
The SDK and especially the documentation incl. easy access to information? Yes!
A complete IDE? No!

Or, to be more precise, in Amiga world the "IDE"s were always third party products (SAS, Storm, ...). A decent working enviroment (I'm not talking of real "modern" stuff like Eclipse) like CubicIDE or Simons Codebench would be nice - but both have their flaws, the first - common - one: If you don't know them you will not find them (not in the first step, though).

A new developer CD with full and intense information, autodocs, included autodoc reader, Richards to-be-published programming guide and maybe "demo" versions of full set up Cubic and/or Codebench enviroments would be nice. I would be the first customer... (even if I can find all this stuff somewhere somehow).

_________________
X1000|II/G4|440ep|2000/060|2000/040|1000

@vidarh

Quote:

I have a server that I could set up a wiki on if there's interest. I'd also be happy to help read through and revise things (and test the various advice - I'm still coming to terms with the Amiga platform again :) )

+1

_________________
X1000|II/G4|440ep|2000/060|2000/040|1000

@emeck

Quote:

That would be great. Don't know how much interest/participation would be at first but having something setup could attract more people later. Your own experience of what do you miss or find confusing at first, both as user and as developer, will be valuable.

There's plenty of information and experience out there, I'm sure it wouldn't take too long before a useful base of information is included. I'll do my bit to help out as well, but I'm not the most experienced programmer on the Amiga...

Quote:

Having a wiki with a part for general use and another for developers then? In the former we can explain usage of, for example, Preferences, and explaining the FS structure, how to work with the shell, what are Amiga icons and tooltypes and stuff like that. In the later, well, what tools are available as default for developing in/for AmigaOS, what others are availabl for download, replacements for the defaults ones (KCon, other shells, editors, etc), and what would be needed to port still.

Yes, I also think this would be a great thing, and would be happy to contribute as much as I can to this! I started compiling a lot of information like this years ago for my own (non-Wiki) website, but lost interest because it was hand-coded and dropped it many years ago. I found that most people who used my Amiga had trouble with things like volumes, assigns and datatypes/lack of extensions, and something like this would greatly help people like that!

_________________
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@billt
Quote:

I didn't realize there were only 2 USBs. Odd, I agree with this guy, there should be more. I obviously have never seen a SAM board myself.

The SAM has 5 USBs. 2 external (used for keyboard and mouse) and 3 internal.

@ZeroG

Internal mean not accesable without opening the box ?

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@Hans

Quote:

His experiences are a good guide of where the difficulties are. However, I disapprove of his desire to use emacs or vim; those are horrible editors.

What can you recommend that is better than Emacs that runs on at least one of more of AOS4, classic or AROS?

Here are my basic requirements to be able to use something other than emacs:

* Must have syntax highlighting support for at least C, C++, Ruby, XML/HTML, CSS, Markdown, or a very easy way of adding it.
* Must have easily configurable "smart indenting" for the above languages.
* Must have an easy way of switching between multiple files using the keyboard; ideally using split panes in a single window/screen rather than having to manually set up various windows.
* Need to be able to do cut/past fully via the keyboard (including marking regions)

So far, I've been unable to find anything that suits me better than Emacs, but I don't particularly like it, and finding a better alternative that runs on an Amiga flavor OS would give me one more reason to use it.

_________________
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@kas1e
Quote:

Internal mean not accesable without opening the box ?

Internal USB ports are just 4 pins in a row on the mainboard, you normally connect them to the USB ports build in the front of your computercase.

@vidarh

Actually, CubicIDE/GoldED can do a lot of things (but no support for Ruby syntax highlighting, I guess, and I don't know how difficult it is to add it. But it has syntax highlighting support for Hollywood! Emacs and Vim does not ). I like GoldED very much on AmigaOS. Also VIM on linux is more powerful (if and only if you know all the possiblities and shortcuts) on AmigaOS it's a pain due to the extremly poor con/shell. That's a pity. Vim was an Amiga program first, right? And VIM is great if you get used to it. I prefer it over emacs


nexus


P.S. Hooray, my 300th (!) posting!

Last edited by nexus on 13-May-2010 at 09:54 AM.

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@vidarh

Quote:

vidarh wrote: @Hans Quote: His experiences are a good guide of where the difficulties are. However, I disapprove of his desire to use emacs or vim; those are horrible editors. What can you recommend that is better than Emacs that runs on at least one of more of AOS4, classic or AROS? Here are my basic requirements to be able to use something other than emacs: * Must have syntax highlighting support for at least C, C++, Ruby, XML/HTML, CSS, Markdown, or a very easy way of adding it. * Must have easily configurable "smart indenting" for the above languages. * Must have an easy way of switching between multiple files using the keyboard; ideally using split panes in a single window/screen rather than having to manually set up various windows. * Need to be able to do cut/past fully via the keyboard (including marking regions) So far, I've been unable to find anything that suits me better than Emacs, but I don't particularly like it, and finding a better alternative that runs on an Amiga flavor OS would give me one more reason to use it.

There's Codebench for Amiga OS 4, and CubicIDE for 68K Amigas (although it works on OS 4 and MorphOS too). There's also another code editor in the works that's not released yet, although I don't know if it's still being developed, or what its current status is.

Codebench is a Work In Progress (WIP) and currently has syntax highlighting for C/C++ and Hollywood 4. Syntax highlighting for more languages will come though. CubicIDE is more established, and more complete, but I never did get it to work exactly how I wanted it to. Codebench is my preferred code editor on the Amiga, even though it's still a WIP.


Some extra comments:
Quote:

* Must have easily configurable "smart indenting" for the above languages.

I've typically had trouble with "smart indenting." A little "smartness" to indenting is great, and saves time. However, I routinely have to fight with Visual Studio to get it to leave stuff where I put it.

Quote:

* Need to be able to do cut/past fully via the keyboard (including marking regions)

On the Amiga, Right-Amiga + b is the key combination to start selection of text. Right-Amiga + b again cancels "block select" mode. Even NotePad does this. If you're using a Windows keyboard with your Amiga, then the Amiga keys are the Windows keys.

Hans

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@emeck

Quote:

That would be great. Don't know how much interest/participation would be at first but having something setup could attract more people later. Your own experience of what do you miss or find confusing at first, both as user and as developer, will be valuable.

I'm setting one up now. Will post details once it's up.

_________________
Wiki for new/returning Amiga users - Projects: ACE basic compiler / FrexxEd / Git

@opi

I guess that one important tip for users of other platforms is that, yes, if an installer asks you where to install something, you really can install it wherever you like. One thing that confused him was that the SDK installer asked him where he wanted to install it, and his response to this was "what's the right answer?" as if it were a test. If you take a look at other platforms then there's usually a "right" place for things to be installed, or it might not work properly.

Maybe a default applications drawer should be standard; I personally have an applications drawer and a games one in addition to the standard Workbench drawers.

Hans

_________________
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https://keasigmadelta.com/ - More of my work.