World of Amiga '99 Report

Kermit Woodall took the next seminar, equipped with a fetching pair of "Boing Ball-esque" shoes, and hamburger lunch. I haven't seen ImageFX since an elderly copy appeared on one of the CU Amiga coverdisks. After a quick installation, the demo got off to a good start. It's come a long way, and the list of features is very impressive - judging from the comments of well-informed users, it surpasses industry standard packages such as Photoshop in many areas and I have seen the proof with my own eyes. Strong evidence that the Amiga is still a major contender in graphics work. I can only hope ImageFX and Photogenics, amongst others, are ported early on to the next generation Amigas.

Gary dissappeared afterwards to try and locate one of the QNX engineers rumoured to be making the rounds at the show, but I stayed on to listen to Dr. Farrukh Alavi give an interesting rundown on microprocessor architectures for the 21st Century. There was a slight moment of uneasiness as Win95 and PowerPoint loaded up. I'm sure I heard the words "Amiga", "Scala" and "would've been a better choice" being murmured from a couple of rows behind. The presentation stuttered slightly as PowerPoint exercised its right to do its own thing, but this didn't detract from a fascinating look at what is involved in creating ever more powerful processors, followed by a brief overview of the major proponents of the field. Commodore's Hombre chip even warranted a mention as part of a look at the PA-RISC chip, which was rather nice, as was a slide that covers almost everything anyone outside of Transmeta knows about the Transmeta chip (i.e. not much).

After the presentation I had a quick scout around the stalls for anything interesting to buy, but was slightly disappointed, then returned to the SEAL stall where I found Gary had indeed located the QNX contingent, in particular a user interface engineer and his wife who talked with us about topics as diverse as Neutrino, Amigas, Canada and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. A nicer bunch of people you couldn't hope to meet, although I've been labelled 'square' for not having seen The Matrix yet... *sigh*

Unfortunately, I didn't manage to stay on for the big announcement. I had to make do with newsgroups,

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