No offence to Amiga, but the situation with making show announcements immediately public still needs to be worked on. It took a long time to get official information posted on the website, and in the meantime there was a trickle of information of varying quality and accuracy filtering out from a variety of sources, making the task of collation awkward at best. Still, Fleecy Moss and Gary Peake were about on assorted mailing lists to answer questions... just not the ones I'm subscribed to it seems ;-)
Reaction has been mixed, and like I said I'm still not 100% sure of where I lie between the extremes though I must say I'm still optimistic. Credit where credit is due, Amiga have placed their foot firmly down and drawn up the boundaries for particular issues - direction from officialdom has been sorely lacking in the past and it's good to see this happening. It may not please some, but better to make the lines clear rather than leave everyone hanging around and uncertain. It's that uncertainty which has done the most damage over the years, in my humble opinion of course.
So last month I was talking about a mysterious PDA manufacturer, which should now be familiar to everyone as Sharp. I'm not going to go into the PDA situation in depth, but suffice to say that it provides an important aspect with which to build on. The news about Psion also being involved is both interesting and another valuable contribution towards building up credibility, a higher profile and offer invaluable ways for Amiga developers to tap into what is going on in the changing world out there.
The other major announcement of the show followed the direction of AmigaOS and the AmigaDE, note the distinction. AmigaOS will now make it to version 4.0, and begin the migration towards a native PowerPC implementation at 6-monthly stages with 4.2, 4.5 and then AmigaOS 5.0. Nope I don't know what happened to 4.3 or 4.4 either.
OS 5.0 will thus hit the streets at the end of next year, while OS 4.0 will be arriving far sooner - that is to
