Editorial

Over the last few weeks, I have started getting new types of emails from old friends and new acquaintances alike. Spread amongst the emails advertising lonely college girls (don't they have friends?), a bigger organ (how do they know I'm musical?) and visits to Italy (my son thinks Viagra is near Florence), I have almost deleted most of them since they don't fit into my subconcious 'do not send straight to trash' once over.

However, on rescuing and reading them, I have been unable to stop smiling. They are not jokes though but questions, statements and dreams being shared. You see, it seems that people are now hearing about the rebirth of the Amiga. We haven't started the marketing campaign proper yet but that certainly isn't stopping the community from doing its utmost to celebrate the impending birth of the latest addition to our almost 20 year old platform.

AmigaOS4.0 is kicking, flipping and strutting its stuff, eager to break from the developer environments. Community members are eager to prepare the way. From the AmigaOS4 roadshow in Europe to the smaller shows across the planet, we arrived at the breakthrough, the first showing of AmigaOS4.0 on the AmigaOne at the Pianeta Amiga. Since that magical moment, we now have user groups jumping forwards, each with at least one member having an AmigaOne and wanting to show it off to the rest of the members.

In the last month alone we have had the OASE show in Graz and the AmigaOS4 DownUnder shows organised jointly by ADUG and Doug Moir at Anything Amiga. The coming month will see demonstrations organised by user groups in Bath and London (UK), the Alchemie show in France, The Amiga show in Ottawa Canada and a user group demonstration in the West of Canada and at a show in Texas. We also had a great article in one of the leading Japanese computer magazines that has brought in a lot of attention.

At each show, something different is seen as AmigaOS4.0 improves almost every day, becoming richer, faster and more impressive. This infects everyone at the shows, turns digital and percolates into the World Wide community where the excitement continues to grow - not in one big bang but with little bits of good news every few days all contributing to a growing wave of joy.

Still though I cannot give you a date for the official launch. We do not have the gold master in front of us and that was our promise to the community, that we would not announce the official launch until it was in front of us. Work is well underway on the last big set of work, integrating graphics.library and Picasso96 and then porting it to the PPC; indeed our conservative estimate suggests that the current state of AmigaOS4.0 wowing the user groups is still only giving us 10% of the graphics performance we expect to get from an integrated and native implementation.

I hope you enjoy this issue of CAM. It is special because a few of the articles in it are now coming to you directly from AmigaOS4.0 on the AmigaOne. From Stephane Guillard's choice of favourite backdrops from our amazing backdrop competition to Steven Solie's article on installing the current private beta on the AmigaOne, you are now able to see and feel how close the great day is.