Editorial

The user interface of any device is place where tool and user come together. Whether that tool is a hammer, a food processor, a car, a video recorder or a computer, it is the tectonic plate boundary where producer and consumer rub up against each other. This is no spurious analogy because interface designers often refer to 'friction', the capacity of an interface for interfering in the user workflow. In plate tectonics, boundaries can run against each other smoothly or they can catch, stick and then explosively free themselves, creating earthquakes. It is the aim of an interface designer to minimize friction, ensuring an intuitive and useful workflow for the user.

I decided to talk about user interfaces because with the first few shows of the AmigaOS4.0 on Tour program already completed, the waiting world has been treated to the developing default interface design for the upcoming platform release. Screen grabs of the interface in various states have been posted to the web appeared in at least one national print magazine and have engendered a lot of comment and discussion.

In approaching AmigaOS4.0, the priority has been, first and foremost, to make the operating system independent of its hardware and to switch from a dead processor family to a living and growing one (I hope everyone cheered when the 970 was announced). In essence, the foundation of the Amiga operating system has been drastically altered to extend its lifecycle and to allow the platform to take advantage of the power of the new hardware. This has been done and we are very pleased with the results.

For the user though, this foundation is and should be largely invisible. For them, it is the interface that is the Amiga platform, where they spend their time and perform their digital tasks. Obviously they want their new platform to have a brand new, amazing looking interface with all sorts of amazing effects that would have the users of 'other' platforms green with envy.

This has created a conflict for the AmigaOS development team. The foundation is far more important in terms of efficiency and stability than the interface. The interface is also a 'surface service'; in other words it sits on top of a stack of other services that actually do most of the hard work of maintaining it. This means that anything but superficial changes need to occur deeper down in the operating system, and the deeper you go, the more crucial the services become. As an analogy, the interface is like the play being performed on stage, with the user being the audience. However, it was the costume department, the carpentry department, the musicians, the lighting engineers, and the financiers who actually allowed the play to ever happen.

To radically change the interface would thus unleash a domino effect of changes that would ripple throughout the operating system and the project. Sticking those changes on top of a brand new mixed mode kernel and hardware abstraction layer would have been just asking for trouble and so the decision was made to move work on a brand new interface to a future release, one that could sit on top of the Amiga Generation 2 (AG2) projects.

With that said, the AmigaOS4 development team also realized that we couldn't just sit there with the same old interface. First impression, a picture painting a thousand words and all that. A plan thus emerged to give the grand old dames of graphics.library, intuition.library, layers.library, icon.library and Workbench one final makeover whilst also introducing some little teasers for the future, application.library and Amidock.

The result is a highly configurable but very 'Amiga' interface that can still hold its own in the looks stakes with any of its competitors. Technomagic of the highest order has been performed to get the old dames to dance again but the result of their final exertion has been both to allow us to concentrate on building a high performance foundation for AmigaOS4 and yet provide a compelling interface experience for AmigaOS4.0. With that out of the way, it means that future releases can concentrate on re-implementing the higher level services from scratch, ultimately reaching all the way up to the interface itself.

Of course that isn't to say that AmigaOS4.0 won't look a whole lot better than AmigaOS3.9. We asked one of the 'bright new things' of the Amiga scene, Matt Kille of the award winning Zeoneo to design the default interface look for AmigaOS4.0 and he has provided us with a look and feel that pays a lot of respect to the past whilst addressing the future with dignity and professionalism.

It isn't gaudy, it isn't in your face and in time honored Amiga tradition, and it was lambasted from one side of the earth to the other. Part of this was obviously disappointment that the underlying services weren't being extended for AmigaOS4.0 but then we are pretty sure people would 'rather have a pig that screams than a princess that has to be carried everywhere', as the saying goes. Once that was explained, people began to see the immense amount of work put into the default design and it will allow AmigaOS4.0 to hold her head up proudly when she steps out into the world; and if you don't like it, you can always change it.