Since the improvements required to make the Amiga great again are multi-facetted, I'm going to separate them into different categories and I will list all the sources for inspiration for each improvement in brackets after the suggestion.

• Software
  • Workbench Improvements
    
    • The most important thing to be done is to make Workbench complete. Don't offer cut-down versions with particular machines, give everyone everything. Offer the operating system on a CD, if possible, so that Workbench installation is as painless as possible. The installation process should be intelligent and check for system hardware before installing high end facilities in a low end system.
  • Internal
    
    • Make WB properly multi-tasking. At the moment you can't copy a file using WB and still do anything else. For copy (or multiple file deletion) operations, a progress bar with a cancel button should be added to Workbench which gives the names of the files as they are copied (or deleted). (System 7, Windows95)
    • Make sure that some system of RTG is included in WB (probably CyberGFX). Ditch all the stupid screenmodes that no-one uses like Super HiRes and incorporate a pseudo 24-bit emulation whereby WB dithers down any image to match the screen colour resolution automatically. (System 7, EGS)
    • Replace cycle gadgets with pop-up menus. (Cycle2Menu, TypeSmith)

      
      Pop-up gadgets make a lot more sense than cycle gadgets, particularly when there are a lot of options

    • Make CD-ROM an integral part of Workbench (including the ability to boot from CDs) and include an audio CD player and, possibly, a PhotoCD viewer. (AsimCDFS 3)

      
      (80% scale) AsimCDFS's audio player could do with being font-sensitive and a bit smaller, but it's better than nothing

    • Copy and Paste ought to be systemwide and in interfaces not just fields or text files, so that you could clip the name of a program, an icon, a picture, a sound sample and so on and then paste them wherever appropriate. There should also be a scrapbook program like the Macintoshes where you can keep clips when you reboot the machine. (System7)
    • Add a tcp/ip stack to Workbench. (to encourage networking as standard) (System7)
    • Make file notification systemwide so that if you copy files into the ram disk in a file manager, an open ram window on workbench should reflect the change, etc.
    • Cut out all the bitmap fonts and CG Fonts and go for systemwide Postscript or True Type. This will cut down font reduplication and frustration caused by not having the right font in the right format. There is already an ATM-type type1 manager for the Amiga available as shareware.
    • Make system requesters respond to return and Esc for OK and cancel respectively (and initial letters in case of more than two choices). (ARQ)

      
      Hitting Return will activate the Format button and Escape will cancel the requester

    • If the Amiga is supposed to be such a multimedia machine, then some sort of system support for animation should be taken for granted. A chunky pixel format screen is far better suited to the playback of colourful animations than is the Amiga's bitplane approach, which only really shines when there are fewer than 16 colours on screen. If a 68030 base machine is a possibility, then the pussyfooting around should stop and serious work done on improving the performance of WB in this field. It has only been held back at the present time by the large proportion of 68000-based machines in the marketplace. Now that there are more A1200s out there people are trying things which tax the system more, but even more could be achieved with an even more powerful entry level machine. There could also be libraries for 3D graphics, sound and picture manipulation that would work systemwide. If this was the case, newer versions of these libraries could be supplied as they were improved. This would mean even less reinvention of the wheel and more system-friendly games.
    • Add support for 24-bit printer output and rewrite the printer drivers that Workbench offers. (Consider incorporating Wolf Faust's Studio system)
    • Incorporate CrossDos and CrossMac into Workbench and change the way disk icons are shown. From now on, there should only ever be one icon for a floppy disk on Workbench and the Format requester should have a pop-up gadget so that the user can choose whether to format a disk as AmigaDOS, MS-DOS or Macintosh compatible. (MultiFileSystem)

      
      Perhaps a future format requester might look something like this? It should, of course, be completely font-sensitive not this mix of fonts

  • Menu
    
    • Incorporate the drag and drop facilities offered by SwazInfo into the standard WB Information requester. (SwazInfo)
    • Change the way the 'View By Name' item works in the Windows menu on WB. Rather than having the sort functions in the menu make it so that users can just click on the headings across the top of the window to change the way items are sorted and implement a Macintosh-style list where drawers can be opened inside the same window rather than opening a new one (this is pretty difficult to explain, but if you have ever used a Macintosh, Windows95 or the MUI Web Browsers you will know what I mean. See the picture, it's pretty much self-explanatory). (System7, MUI 3)
      The way the Mac shows directory windows by name is highly efficient. Notice that folder sizes can be automatically calculated and that the list is sorted according to the heading that is underlined. You can change the sorting by clicking on a different heading
      

  • Icons
    
    • Maintain the snapshotting of the ram disk icon transparently (It could be put into envarc: as default_ram.info).
    • Consider incorporating a program's icon into the body of the file, rather than having a separate .info file. This would reduce confusion and speed certain operations up. (System7)

  • Shell
    
    • Institute * as the default wildcard character instead of #?. (MS-DOS)

  • Facilities
    
    • Create an Arexx interface for Workbench itself, possibly with a macro recorder to make systemwide repetitive actions more simple (QuicKeys)
    • Ensure that the system file requester offers the options of creating new directories, deleting files and renaming them. (MFR)

      
      Magic File Requester shows the way the ASL file requester should have been made with menu items to rename and delete files
      

    • Create a systemwide trashcan that sits on the Workbench rather than having a trashcan for each individual disk (System7)

    • Add a system tools menu. (System7, ToolsDaemon)
      ToolsDaemon allows you to add as many new menus to Workbench as space will allow
      
    • Add a systemwide titlebar clock (TitleClock)
    • Stop people fiddling around with the Shell so much and add a GUI for the editing of the user-startup so that people don't have to type in instructions they may not feel comfortable with (assignprefs)
    • Increase the amount of options for disabled people, including changing the mouse buttons over for left-handed users and a built-in magnifying glass. The options to change font style and size are splendid and are not offered by many other operating systems
    • Include some kind of system manager in WB so that programs which have failed can have their processes, screens and windows shut down (and memory freed if possible). This should be an automatic process, but there should be a user interface for expert users.
    • Extend exchanges abilities (more like the MUI Exchange).
    • Extend GadTools to allow user definable/selectable gadget outlines.
    • Add a screengrab function systemwide that will deal with any screentype (especially handy for us journos). (System7)

  • Multiview
    
    • Add a new drawer in DEVS: for added tools to use in Multiview, like video or sound digitisers. If Multiview is made into an UrApp (the basis for other applications) then it can be built up into a powerful multimedia tool.
    • change the sound datatype for multiview so that it includes a scalable view of the sample and the ability to position the cursor anywhere in the sample and add playback gadgets like any normal sample player.
    • change multiview so that not only can datatyped files be saved as their iff equivalents, but also as any other format. incorporate copy and paste in multiview.
    • Make multiview HTML compatible with appropriate navigation tools (this would also mean including adding the ability to have inlined images in a multiview document) with a view to replacing AmigaGuide with HTML change the way datatypes work so that they too no longer rely on there being Chip RAM to play with.
    • Also make them resolution and colour independant so that people with 24-bit displays won't need to use a different file viewer. This will require a systemwide dithering tools which should be extremely fast and available to any program that requires it. This will also increase the memory overhead for machine operation so it should not be available on machines with low ram. (These machines should not be allowed to use 24-bit displays at all)

• Hardware
  • Machine features
    
    • Incorporate the PCI bus into future Amigas in preparation for a complete changeover to PCI in future machines.
    • Add user-accessible SIMM sockets to all machines and make sure that they can take a wider variety of SIMMs than current machines. If possible, allow mixng and matching of memory types (ie. a mix of 1MB and 4MB SIMMs in one machine)
    • Consider ditching the Amiga's custom chipset and going for emulation of it in a modular VGA-type system which can be painlessly upgraded to offer better features such as 24-bit screens, 3D graphics manipulation and faster window updates
    • Add an internal speaker which can be controlled from a sound preferences program to make sure that any Amiga can have sound of some sort with any monitor.
    • Return to a hardware flicker fixer (if necessary) to ensure compatibility with all monitor types
    • Give each machine an internal hardware serial number to help stamp out piracy. This can be done by making sure that software refers to the machine's serial number for authentication when run.
    • Make sure that all Amigas come with high density drives (Gary needs updating to help with this.

  • Kickstart
    
    • Incorporate features like filename completion and a scrollback history into kickstart so that the shell may have them even when started with no startup-sequence or user-startup.
    • Extend the Early Boot screen to include WBStartup programs and device drivers, so that they may be disabled where necessary, and, at the very least, allow a mouse button or key press to disable the WBStartup drawer without having to rename it.
    • Make sure the Amiga can be booted from a CD.
    • If Kickstart can be put onto a flash ROM it could be updated through software, saving the material cost and effort of having to send out new ROMs each time Workbench hits a major revision.
• Miscellaneous
  
  • Style Guide
    
    • A new style guide will be needed to ensure that programmers know how best to implement their programming ideas, and Workbench should be the strongest adherent to it
    • ask programmers to make their programs into commodities, so that they may be affected by Exchange. This would also allow for a "System Shutdown" command whereby all currently open application could be given a signal to quit and a "hide application" command to iconify or hide the interface of any program. (System7)
    • Ask programmers not to assume anything about the system their program will run on, such as whether the machine will have any chip ram, what size screen programs will be run on, whether they will even be using a screen. All programs should try to make use of the supplied system libraries for sound and graphics.
    • If Workbench is to come on CD-ROM, make sure that the additional space isn't wasted by adding demos of commercial software and additional PD and shareware tools. This would be quite hard to keep up to date, but if Workbench development is to proceed at a rapid pace, there might only be six months between releases, which isn't too bad.

Conclusions
As I said in the intro, Amiga Technologies have their work cut out for them. But Apple has managed the transfer to the PowerPC chip admirably, if not fully efficiently. All the things that made the Amiga great even as recently as five years ago are increasingly liabilities and things like the custom chipset and Workbench are woefully out of date. Amiga Technologies have restarted the developer support program that was one of Commodore's best features and are actively recruiting developers that have moved to other platforms, or who have never programed for the Amiga to come onto their new platform, so, with luck, the software situation should improve dramatically, but it needs to get better in the right way.

One of the biggest problems facing Amiga Technologies is the fact that the Amiga is in almost as bad a position PR-wise as Skoda and Lada are in the motor car industry. People with experience of computer platforms other than the Amiga look down on our machine as a games computer, an impression cultivated in this country by Commodore circa Steve Franklin. A sea change has been long overdue, and can only be brought about with a serious, longterm publicity drive. Like Skoda, the Amiga is now seen as the cheap end of the market, with nothing going for it other than its price. The fact that you don't have to buy a monitor or hard drive for it is not an advantage; people will happily buy a monitor and a hard drive when they upgrade to a PC (a serious computer). But the PC won't be the competition for the Amiga in the next few years, it will be the Mac. With Apple agreeing licensing deals with companies all over the world and a very user-friendly operating system, the Mac is the ideal replacement for the Amiga, much more so than the PC, but the Mac is not well-known enough yet. As a dedicated Amiga owner who has spent a great deal of time, effort and money on his computer system, I wish Amiga Technologies all the best and hope that at least some of my suggestions will be implemented for what would be a world-beating Workbench.