A "new Amiga Operating System" to be called AmigaOS4 has been
in the minds of Amiga users for a long long time now. Mostly due to false
promises from previous owners, or even real promises that for whatever reason
never came to fruition. In this time, many people made "mockup" screenshots of
what they'd like AmigaOS4 to be.
Here are some of those mockups:
image1.jpg - My personal favourite by far. If
AmigaOS (any version!) ends up having all the features seen here without 3rd
party addons, I'll be one very happy man.
image2.png - While I don't like the designer's
sense of colour/patterning, the things to note in this image are the features
such as shadows on windows, a "tree" filemanager etc.
image3.png - Simple, but quite elegant. This
could probably be achieved with careful work using 3rd party applications on
Classic AmigaOS.
image4.gif - This would be my second favourite.
Again, I dislike the designer's sense of colour, but it would obviously be a
user configurable thing. Much of this could be done with 3rd party applications
on Classic AmigaOS, but a few small details do stand out.
image5.jpg - A rather interesting design.
Personally, I don't like it much, but it's all a matter of taste I guess. This
one was designed with the "PreBox" in mind (don't ask, another historical
failure I'm afraid).
image6.jpg - Another shot of the same OS
design. I guess I should point out that this may actually have existed in some
rudimentary form, but I can't find any solid evidence of that anywhere. I've
seen others with images of p.OS as "concept" images but I can tell you from
firsthand use that p.OS was real!
image7.jpg - Okay, maybe just an excuse for a
sexy girl on the backdrop, but I do like the fade effect on the titlebar and the
tabs/buttons/whatever for programs (minimised/iconofied/launcher?)
image8.jpg - Quite different from others, but
considering this image comes from 1997, it's really not bad at all. Change those
bizarre window gadgets and I'd be more than happy with this look.
As these images are from publicly available locations (including Aminet) I have not sought the permission of the original creators to put these images on this site. Should you see an image you have created and do not wish it to be here, please contact me immediately and I shall remove it.
Of course, now that Hyperion are creating the REAL AmigaOS4, it's about time we got some REAL screenshots. So Hyperion have obliged. Note that these shots pretty much are designed to show features of AmigaOS4. AmigaOS has always been a highly customisable OS and that won't change, so don't think you'll be stuck with any colour scheme or design you see here.
At the request of people with older and slower Classic Amigas who have trouble with JPEG decoding, some of the images are also supplied in IFF - note that IFF has a much larger filesize though, so the downloads may take a bit longer.
I think it can be plainly seen that they're taking the best of the ideas the community has provided, the original operating system and ideas from commonly used 3rd party applications and creating a truly wonderful user experience.
"spinningnucleon" from the AmigaOne mailing list decided to have a quick go at playing with a window image from the official screenshots to see what he could come up with. His images are here.
