Further aMozilla Developments

DrPsycho writes "Just a quick follow up to the previous article that appeared on slashdot about the development of aMozilla, the Mozilla port for the Amiga. The people behind the project have started posting screenshots of the Navigator layout under AmigaOS, and the look & feel of Messenger. News about the project is available here. They've also started an eZine about aMozilla. Looks like it might be more than vapour after all. "

Uh-oh.. the old codebase?

[HoserHead]

If aMozilla isn't using NGLayout they might have made a big mistake. The old codebase is dead and doesn't support wonderful things like CSS1, DOM, and RDF 100%. While I appreciate the work that went into this, most of it was probably porting NSPR, and once you learn the codebase it shouldn't be too difficult to apply this to NGLayout. I urge the aMozilla team to please switch to NGLayout, if they haven't already. You're using an old, unmaintained codebase if you don't.

Note that I did look for this information but I couldn't find otherwise.

Also, one more thing: You have to release the source. I have seen a bunch of stuff floating around on their eZine about beta .exes - but do not forget to make available the source code, because otherwise you're violating the NPL.

(I won't get into the debate of cathedral vs. bazaar - both have their proponents and detractors. Regardless of which model you choose to follow, it's not an option on whether to follow the NPL.)

Licence violation - not yet

[HoserHead]

They don't violate the license until they distribute binaries. Much like the GPL, the NPL doesn't require you distribute the changed sources unless you also distribute the changed binaries - or to put it another way, you don't have to distribute any changes if it's an internal project.

Until they distribute binaries, they are perfectly within their rights under the NPL - but once they do, sources had better be available. I fear the wrath that Mozilla.org will bring upon them (well, it's probably more like "Post them please." If they say "No" then, I really fear the wrath) if they don't follow the NPL.

Ugh. The Microsoft User Interface

[Tomahawk]

I have to agree - MUI is terrible. The idea behind it is quite good, but there are a few points that I really really don't like... 1) It is very Microsoft (slow, big, bloated, etc). 2) You have to pay for it - programmers have to pay for the dev. kits, and the users have to pay in order to be able to use things like Themes. The unregistered very just barely works. 3) There are other things, like Triton and ClassAct, which are much fasters. They may not be as configurable, but they are smaller, faster, and produce results as good as unregistered MUI will allow (and they are free!) If you have a look at the Amiga browser AWEB [amitrix.com] you will see a browser made with ClassAct. You will see that it is still very Amiga like (which I personally still like!), and it works.

Themable

[Matts]

It's MUI - it's totally themable right down to the smallest details of every widget (even further than GTK and KDE). Not sure why the screenshot user wants his apps to look like that though.

Matt.

I still think it's fud atm though - an app like that is just a few lines with MUI - just as it would be in KDE or GTK.
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? Since when?

[Matts]

Since MUI was released, I'm not sure when that was, but it's probably about 5 years now.

You didn't think the idea of themable widgets was new did you?

Matt.
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Barely any Assembler

[Matts]

There's barely any assembler left as of OS 3.1. Most of that was removed in the transition from 2.04 IIRC. There's still some of course, but only in the tight kernel loops, which would be easy to code out - see the AROS project.

BTW: Allan Havemose (chief developer at Amiga Inc) said he was interested in releasing OS3.1 as open source, probably after 5.0 gets released. (some time in 2000).

Matt.
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TI-99/4Zilla

[hatless]

The TI-99/4zilla project is at a crucial juncture. We are trying to figure out the best way to distribute the application. Since the standard TI floppy holds 90k, requiring users to have 18 daisy-chained floppy drives may prove inelegant. If anyone knows how to extend page-switching to allow us to break the 32K ROM cartridge limit to make a 1.6MB cart, it would be a big help. We don't want to limit ourselves to the few users out there with those nice, big 5MB hard drives.

Of course, if we could double this ROM capacity again for about 4MB, then we could run it from ROM and get a huge speed increase because we wouldn't have to swap from RAM into the 32K maximum RAM environment.

One interesting feature of TI-99/4Zilla unique to the platform is the availability of 1-bit sprites, addressable through the DOM and ECMAScript. We have a few demo pages at our site for those 99/4 users who are interested. Unfortunately, we can't get it to work properly under eumlators :(

On a related note, we hear that our friends at the University of Ljubljana are looking for people to help with the Ohio Scientific Challenger port. Besides the constraints of working in a mere 16K of RAM, the project team has concerns about dynamically linking to the libraries stored on audiocassette at a mere 300 baud.

Great!

[Avus]

Now finally something that's more than vapour on the Amiga front.
And MUI is a really great toolkit. It's theming capabilities make gtk look pale.

Now if only those serial ports would be a bit faster on my Amiga...

Faster Amiga Serial Ports

[DrPsycho]

There are a number of serial cards you can purchase... much faster than the dismal performance you get from the ancient serial ports that came standard on the old Amiga motherboards. Cards like Multiface and the GVPIO system really jumpstart serial performance. I think the upcoming IOBlix card also has serial port options.

The hard part is trying to get anything in stock. Try National Amiga [nationalamiga.com]. If they don't have it they'll know someone who might. Or you can search Agnes [cucug.org] for Amiga related articles/web sites.