AmiDock and application.library in AmigaOS 4 (cont'd)

The new version of AmiDock will also take advantage of another new long-missed feature of AmigaOS: application.libary. This library allows native OS4 applications to tell the operating system that it is an application, whats it's name is and a lot of other information. Each time a new application is started, AmiDock will automatically add the application to it's main dock (see Picture 6 to the right). That way, the main dock has now also a task bar functionality which even allows to access some default actions of applications in a context menu. The picture shows an example for this.

The application.library also solves another annoying problem of the Amiga operating system: the way how configuration files are stored. Until now, there was no default system within AmigaOS which allowed an application programmer to easily store and retrieve settings of programs. The application programmer always had to write his own solution for this task.

Some programmers used proprietary binary files as shown in Picture 7 below.