Amiga Inc. announces new hardware

[Submeg]

The problem is, the open source thing has been done. The mainstream is MS. There just isnt room for Amiga...they need something, something to catch buyers attention.

[Harrison]

The obvious market is a portable OS, and this is something that has been mentioned and even worked on in the past (and I'm sure one of the companies still has plans for this). The Amiga OS is very lightweight, requiring not many resources to run and it is very stable. It's the perfect OS to adapt and develop for a portable platform and as has been tried in the past, set top boxes or media centres.

The problem was that when it was tried in the past the market wasn't ready for either as the technology wasn't mature enough. Now finally the marketplace is ready. The HD revolution is finally taking hold now that digital tv is finally starting to fully replace analogue, and people are actively looking for streaming and media devices to go into their home entertainment systems.

And also the portable device market is far more advanced than it was in the 90's. Look at the PDAs we now have available such as the iPAQ or consoles like the PSP. The technology is available for a truly portable Amiga to be realised.

[Submeg]

Oh yea, portable Amiga based OS is cool, I have nothing against that. But Im talking as a competitor to MS and Linux (Mac's arent comeptition...the only reason they are still breathing is because of iPod...lol) It really needs an edge to grab ahold in the market. For example, even if the OS was different and the operating system was different, still being able to open word documents would be cool.

[TiredOfLife]

You can open Word documents with an Amiga now.
I don't think there is anything that you can edit and save as Word though.

[Harrison]

When I used to use an Amiga as my main system I used to be able to open, edit and save Word .doc files for my college and university work. Some of the applications I had could open and handle the files directly. Not all features and codes in a complex Word document were supported, but all of the major ones that I needed were. I also used to use excel files on an Amiga too without a problem.

Are there any datatypes on the Amiga for Office documents? I seem to remember I may of had one for .doc files.

[AlexJ]

Remember that the .doc format itself is being phased out in favour of the XML based .docx (used in MS Word 2007) and .odt (used by OpenOffice, KOffice and Google Docs).

Both these formats are open (in the sense that the specification is, and supposedly always will be freely available to anyone that wants) so that should make it easier for Amiga office software to be compatible.

Of course there are a lot of people using Office 2003 and older at the moment, but these new formats will start to become more common place.

[Harrison]

In recent years more file formats have become open source. One of the first commercial file formats to do this was from Macromedia with the Flash SWF format. They were smart though and didn't release anything relating to the actual development format .fla though which was a good way (at the time) from completely stopping Adobe from competing on a level with Flash, or smaller companies and freeware developers from creating products that could compete with Flash. Obviously that's all changed now because Adobe just took the other route in the end and bought out Macromedia and therefore got the code for the Flash format anyway.

I'm not sure how long it will take for new file formats such as docx to take off and become commonplace. The problem is that these files are most used in business, and it is common practice to send files to other people in a format that can be commonly read by anyone. This means that it has to be the most basic form of format that can be read by any version of Word since Word 97 as you would be surprised how many people and companies are still using a version so old, or even older.

Thinking back on it, I don't actually think I used the Word .doc format when I was editing a file on both an Amiga and PC. I'm sure I used the much more primative .rtf format and I'm sure it was because we had to sometimes use Macs!

[TiredOfLife]

I did have something that viewed Excel files but have long since lost it.
There is also a viewer for Powerpoint but it os OS4.0 only.

[AlexJ]

Convertor plug-ins (that do both read and write) are already available from MS for Word 2000,XP and 2003 so that could speed up docx take-up.

As for SWF, you're not exactly correct. The specification for SWF is freely available provided you sign an agreement before reading it. As part of the agreement you aren't disallowed from 'implementing software that plays the format'. Hence why they're having to use a clean-room approach to create the open source Gnash SWF player.

[Harrison]

Really? That's changed then. When Macromedia first took over Flash and launched Flash 3 they released the specifications of SWF as an open source format. A number of companies including Adobe quickly released their own competing software that supported the format but never managed to match it. The positive effect was that a lot of creative software does now support exporting projects to swf format. I find this most useful with Illustrator and 3DSMax as I can output files created in those packages and then load them directly into Flash. Although I do tend to export from 3DSMax as illustrator files more as it retains more information.

Maybe this changed when Adobe took over the company. They have never been one to like sharing.