Phoenix Update
arena, without leaving behind the desktop. Technological partner Tao have already notched up experience in this new and dynamic environment, and together it's safe to say Amiga will not be going the way of Be. You just have to look at Amiga's logo nestling amongst the other major names at newly created Devicetop.com to realise this.
The Amiga and QNX worlds have room for everything, no matter what hardware you're using - it's an important trend to grasp, the horizon is opening up in a major way. But remember that developer environments are best served on the desktop, so don't think the desktop world is going to be watered down. Software development for the Palm, for example, is undertaken through cross-compilers and emulators (interestingly, the Palm emulation uses UAE's 68K emulation core) on host platforms such as Windows, MacOS, UNIX and even our very own Amiga. Small devices may be the 'future', but anyone who has used a mobile phone or Palm will realise that a full-featured development environment isn't practical in such a small footprint. Not impossible, but not ideal.
Amiga's initial desktop development offering may be hosted on Linux for the moment, but it's not something that will remain an exclusive on the desktop - there will be native support as well as environments for other platforms, a wise and secure way of doing things. Neutrino, on the other hand, is already a self-hosted development environment, purely because it's in a ready state - and while it doesn't run on top of another OS, the public release will support the ability to run from Linux ext2 and Windows FAT32 filesystems so anyone can use an existing x86 PC set-up without needing to repartition. Heck, you could buy an Amiga developer box (or Eyetech's equivalents) and run it from that to give you an all-in- one solution. That thought definitely crossed my mind when I heard.
So, with public developer environments scheduled to hit the streets soon, we can expect lots of software to become a reality for the new platforms over the coming months. In fact, the process is already under way. Amiga were quoting a line up of over 100 titles including games and applications software - and they've also been keen to emphasise the support of companies such as Corel, Red Hat, Sun and even a nod to Tao ally Sony, which all means good recognition from the computer industry as a
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