CANDI Store

A few days ago I made my first AMIStore purchases, Workbench CANDI and the RadeonHD 2.4 driver.

AMIStore

I'll start with the RadeonHD driver. For me this was an upgrade from the 1.2 driver and I was pleased with the upgrade price which I felt was reasonable, however it was disappointing to find a transaction charge and VAT added at the PayPal checkout. As I understand from what I've read on the forums A-EON are currently looking at how they can incorporate these into the prices shown in AMIStore's 'shopfront'. I can appreciate that this may not be a straight forward task as different countries will have different sales taxes and I would guess PayPal makes these extras easier to manage. In terms of downloading the software AMIStore worked well and was very quick to notice that I had paid for the software through PayPal. It is nice to get such instant gratification without the usual wait for key files by email or CD-ROMs in the post. I can also see myself buying more AmigaOS software now with AMIStore making it so convenient.

In terms of the RadeonHD driver's features there is not much I can say until there is some software out that supports the driver's new features. I'm eagerly awaiting the new version of MPlayer and have fingers crossed for smooth playback of 720p video on the AmigaONE 500.

Assist 2.0 Sneak Peak

I've been working on Assist 2.0 for a while now and the latest version of the knowledge base is slowly coming together. Some fairly major changes have happened to how the program works which make browsing the A-Z faster. There is also a new layout that shows key information about programs above the article and after a long absence screenshots have returned to the A-Z. Regular users might also notice a few other cosmetic changes in the screenshot below.

Assist 2.0

Dual Screens on the AmigaONE 500

I recently acquired an 'old' Dell LCD display from my dad who found it lurking in the back of a cupboard. I say 'old' because it doesn't seem to have been used and is suspected to have come with a PC some years ago and then for some reason was put away and forgotten about. I decided to put the screen to some use and hook it up to my AmigaONE 500.

I had heard of the possibility of running dual screens on the AmigaONE 500 and was curious to give it a try. My machine has a Radeon HD card connected to a more modern Philips LED display, leaving the motherboard's onboard graphics chip unused. So I connected the Dell display to the motherboard's VGA port and took a look at MUI to see if I could get one of the various MUI screens to use the onboard graphics chip rather than the Radeon HD. This turned out to be pretty simple and just a case of selecting one of the in-built graphics chip's screen modes (see below).

Assist 1.9

Assist 1.9 is now available to download from OS4Depot. This new release makes use of Tuomas Hokka's  recently released 'Download' tool. This gives Assist a progress bar for downloads and removes the need for wget to be installed to download files that could not be downloaded with Hollywood's internal function.

There are also many other small improvements, 37 new articles and 1 new tutorial to enjoy.

New users can grab the latest version from OS4Depot, while existing users can update to this latest release via AmiUpdate.

X500 Plus Mechanical Keyboard

I'm typing this post on my new X500 Plus mechanical keyboard which I picked up from the Post Office this morning. It's so good I felt compelled to write a review and post a few photos!

As you may be aware Loriano Pagni has produced a set of replacement keys for Cherry MX keyboards which he has designed to be the closest match to the Amiga's original keys possible. Loriano wanted a keyboard to complement his excellent X500 Plus computer case and he has done a great job! You can find out more about his keyboard project in this forum thread.

As I don't own an X500 Plus case myself I opted for a standalone USB keyboard to complement my AmigaONE 500. I really liked the look of Loriano's white and beige key set, which looks really authentic, unfortunately he didn't have any white keyboard shells and the black version also matchs my AmigaONE 500's case.

Updated Odyssey Web Browser

Earlier this week an updated version of the Odyssey Web Browser was released for AmigaOS 4.1 that includes HTML5 video and audio support! This means you can finally playback YouTube videos in the the web browser amongst other things. First impressions of Odyssey 1.23 are very good and despite the slow HTML5 video playback on my AmigaONE 500 it is certainly closer to being usable than Timberwolf. Apparently the speed of playback will improve once overlay support arrives, so for now I will still use getVideo but it's a step in the right direction all the same.

Odyssey 1.23 playing a YouTube video

Another nice 'feature' I just discovered is that Odyssey is able to upload photos to Blogger, something that previously wasn't working for me. Many thanks to all the developers involved, you're hard work is much appreciated!

Workbench Refresh

Since getting my AmigaONE 500 up and running again (sometime ago now) I have freshened up my Workbench a little.

The most frequently changed part of any desktop must surely be the humble wallpaper? First I set about changing mine, or rather FlipPaper did. A while back I asked the author of FlipPaper if he could add support for changing the wallpaper through the day to allow the use of a wallpaper set for Ubuntu I came across. He has added the feature and the results are very nice with the wallpaper changing hourly through the day.

Assist 1.8

Assist 1.8 is now available to download from OS4Depot. This update includes improvements to themes and tidier automatic unpacking of archives. There are also 25 new articles and 1 new tutorial to enjoy.

New users can grab the latest version from OS4Depot, while existing users can update to this latest release via AmiUpdate.