I like to make a point in that roadmaps in the Amigaworld are few and far between, something I would like to be changed in the future with new leadership of Amiga.
Anyway, a friendly member of the Amiga community has taken time to create a roadmap out of rumours, facts and information presented at AmiWest09. You can follow the discussion at Amigaworld.net.
We now have enough info from AmiWest & Pianta Amiga to partially construct Hyperion’s roadmap for OS4:
* OS4.1 (final) is already released for Amiga Ones & Pegasos 2. It seems that there may never be a non-beta release for Sam440s…
* OS4.1.1 (final) will be free & available for Amiga Ones, Pegasos 2 & Sam440. Although not yet finished, it is very likely to have:
- A more modern metallic-looking theme, although this may not be the default.
- Much bigger new icons as standard. Looks a bit OS X-ish IMHO.
- Dynamic icon scaling on Workbench! So users with huge monitors won’t be forced to live with small icons, but user with smaller monitors can still have small icons if they wish.
- A pop-up notification system: All applications registered to the application.library can send notifications to the notification server (called Ringhio) that can be configured to display them on the WB screen. Should be used by at least the USB stack & some 3rd-party programs like XNet-RSS.
- Replacement of the WbStartup folder by a StartUp preferences app, so you don’t have to worry about programs in the WbStartup folder becoming out of date. And the loading of programs is accompanied by display of their icons on a bar in the middle of the screen (like in many other OSes).
- Automatic monitor configuration, using DDC (monitor plug’n'play).
- A new shell with support for multiple tabs, scrollbars (with buffer), command history & auto-completion. EDIT: Rigo says this will probably miss OS4.1.1, but will appear in a later minor update.
- A new intuition, with shadows around windows, and extended ReAction.
- More beginner-friendly installer.
- More beginner friendly set-up of OS4, e.g. ContextMenus & ClickToFront running by default.
- Special versions of Tunenet, SimpleMail, and possibly other programs.
- EDIT: 10% faster video playback on Sam440 (at least with DvPlayer), thanks to improved graphics handling.
- A ton of bug fixes, which makes OS4 much more stable, especially on the Sam.
- Better USB support, and especially a lot more stable.
- Support for USB2.0 *might* make it, but this is still in development.
- Workbench automatically updates itself when files change now (this was a past complaint about OS4.1 in an OS News review).
* OS4.2 was revealed by Steven Solie:
- Multi-core (SMP) support! Sounded like this would continue to be developed after OS4.2, presumably because it is such a major change.
- Better USB support (and of course definitely USB2.0 if it doesn’t make it into OS4.1.1).
- A focus on printer support.
- A focus on graphics driver acceleration. i.e. More stuff being hardware accelerated, which fits in with Rogue mentioning elsewhere that Cairo now has hardware support.
- Replacement of the graphics subsystem.
- *Plans* for JAVA support! He did say “for OS4.2 and beyond”, so I guess it may not be fully supported in OS4.2 (if at all), because it would be such a big project.
- There is surely a lot more planned, but it’s currently secret!
Related news:
* It seems that the Most Amitious Project (which is NOT Firefox!) will be announced before the end of this year.
* The Firefox port (Timberwolf) will *hopefully* have an early alpha release made by the end of the year, but this is not a commercial project, so anything could happen. The bounty is already over 3,000 Euros, which Steven Solie said “will really help things along” 
* Hyperion’s settlement with Amiga Inc (both of them & other related parties) was due to mediation that started 28th November 2008. There were in fact several lawsuits (by the different parties), not just the one that was publically followed.
* It will take time for the judges in all of the court cases to be updated on the settlement (and presumably officially close those court cases).
* The number of developers working on OS4 has varied between about 10 & 30. It is currently “in the high teens”, so over 15.
Wow… dual core support in AmigaOS, Amiga f”k yeah!!
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