torsdag 27. desember 2012

Dreaming Of Paradise ;)

AmigaOS 4.1.6 Bungalow Love Desktop
Merry christmas, fellow Amigans! I hope you've had (and still have) a lovely christmas time with your family, friends and your partner if any, opening presents and eating a good dinner. All about being together with people we love and care about.

To be honest, my christmas with my mother and only brother has mostly been about trying to recover from a cold virus infection that firstly appeared at the end of November 2012, lasting for 2 months! We didn't bother with looking for presents, so we gave each other money to spare until we have recovered, then buying what we want. My mother wants a new bed, and i am considering trying to get my living room modernized, removing more of my old furnitures like the old desk where my equipments are. My brother bought himself a nice wireless surround speakers for his HDTV just before he got ill himself.
  
Being ill is not really how i imagined celebrating christmas, but you have to take what you get and make the best of it. The good news however is that we are recovering as we have the medicines we need to help us remove the infection.

Therefore, as you would understand, not much has been done on my AmigaOne 500, except from a couple of updates. AmiUpdate is now updated to a fully working version 2.27, and a RTG library was updated, couple of MUI classes have been updated, along with the YAM Mailer version 2.8 i updated to. AmigaAMP again was updated to version 3.5 for the PPC OS4 native version. Still no Warp3D driver for the Radeon HD cards, but then again it's not the end of 2012 yet ;)

Speaking of 2012. Most people probably thought that 21th of December 2012 would be Judgement Day - End Of The World as we have known it, due to the Maya calender ending its' date at that day. People waited in curiousity and concern asking themselves: "What will happen now?". Guess what, NOTHING happened! We SURVIVED as there was NO Judgement Day! Great news, eh?

Yes, we are safe and will be for a long time still, but with a new beginning. A new and better understanding of our purposes on this planet, and a lesson to understand that we must take better care of each other and all the resources on our planet, never to destroy all lives created on our planet. To be a better human and to do what is expected from us. This i think, is our new philoposy.

The most visual change i have done to my AmigaOS 4.1.6 system, is to use a new background picture i found on the net. A beautiful luxrative bungalow on a tropical island - Paradise, as i would call it. Such a place is my dream, so who knows? Perhaps in a forseable future? Only time will tell.

For now, we should watch closely until end of 2012 for when the Warp3D driver will arrive? Perhaps even the Radeon HD driver will be updated even more?

This completes the short blog for now, as i am still doing my best to recover.

I wish everybody a very Happy Merry Christmas STILL! Have fun and stay with people you love. Create beautiful, honourable memories together.

See you soon :)

Written by
Helge Kvalheim, Norway
 

 

fredag 14. desember 2012

Testing FlipClock 53.1 Beta 3

FlipClock shows weather in Bergen City!
Hi everyone! Doing a short blog this time, as i am doing a great favour for a friend of mine - Testing FlipClock 53.1 Beta 3 under AmigaOS 4.1 Update 6 on an AmigaOne 500 (SAM460ex).

There has been a couple of minor updates after Update 6. AmiUpdate on my system is using version 2.24. There is actually a 2.25 version, but it crashes the system when trying to ignore the DSI error the GR (GrimReaper) shows when trying to run AmiUpdate 2.25 for further scanning for updates. Luckily, there was a Rollback allowing me to roll back to version 2.24 while waiting for version 2.26 to fix the bug 2.25 causes.

Other minor updates were to some AmigaOS components after the Calculator update. These minor updates were to the PCIGraphics.card in Kickstart, workbench.library in LIBS and the Input preference in PREFS. Very useful that AmiUpdate is officially supported by the latest AmigaOS 4.1 update!

Now to the point. I downloaded FlipClock 53.1 Beta 3 from OS4Depot.net, unarched it with Unarc into RAM and tested the application from there. As seen on the screenshot above, FlipClock seems to have gotten a nicer facelift and some rather unique but useful new features.

It's important to mention that if you don't like a multi-tool as Jack (the one i use), then FlipClock is actually the one for you. A very simple, but nice-looking tool! This one is best installed into SYS:Utilities/FlipClock, as well as letting the WBStartup preference starts up FlipClock during startup. This is so that the weather server is located during startup through the Network and can check the weather in your city (Read instructions for how to install FlipClock successfully on your system).

A small photo of the functions of FlipClock is provided in the FlipClock drawer to give you the idea of how the "new" functions work. A very cool thing with FlipClock is that when the minutes and hours pass, the calender-like icons flip an animate to bring up the new minute and/or hour! Very nice, actually! FlipClock in short is very identical to the tool you see in several modern smart phones, also using such a tool to display time, date, month and the weather in your city! It will make your Amiga system look smart and future-proof!

FlipClock works amazingly well under AmigaOS 4.1 Update 6 on ANY compatible hardware you run! Testing it on my AmigaOne 500 running AmigaOS 4.1.6 left NO problems at all! NO GRs, NO crash, NO mess! Simply NO problems! So this concludes the testing by saying the test was a great success!

If you are not interested in all the functions that Jack have, like downloading programs from OS4Depot, like doing a slideshow of your photos and such extra things, but rather only checking time, date, month, year and the weather, then FlipClock is just the tool for you!

Download the latest FlipClock from here: FlipClock 53.1 Beta 3

Written by
Helge Kvalheim, Norway

 

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