AmigaOS 3.9 Review by Gregory Donner

AmigaOS 3.9 Review (cont.)

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Installation of GENESiS (v45.7) is separate from the main 3.9 installation, but takes less than five minutes, and is simple to get up and running. In my case, even without preconfigured modem or ISP setups, I was up and online in about five minutes (thanks to the GENESiS Wizard). There are no time limits or restrictions.

Available since it was released in a separate archive (pre-Boing Bag 1), the new GENESiS Preferences (v45.6) now uses a ReAction GUI, and therefore no longer requires MUI.

The new IControl prefs editor (v45.2) supports IPrefs' new 1:1 window borders. Also, since the OS team worked with the author of Visual Prefs extensively, there is now improved compatibility between the OS and new versions of Visual Prefs.

BenchTrash (v1.72) gives you complete control of how, where, and what you want your trashcan to do. With Boing Bag 1 it now sports a greatly-improved ReAction GUI.

(No snapshot) The addition of VinceEd provides a powerful new Shell with scroll bars, command-line completion, many new options, and much more.

The way docks should have been from the start! Very easy to setup and use (drag and drop icons onto the dock), backed up with a powerful editor for fine tuning.

RAWBInfo (v1.35) provides more information, options and configurability than the old 3.5 Information window, and offers a smaller footprint to boot. One very welcome feature is version checking. What's NOT visible here are the comprehensive menus it offers for control of icons. New in Boing Bag 2: Renaming of the icon file directly from the Information window via a text editor gadget, and the icon's file or data type is now displayed above the icon image.

WBClock (v45.10) is packed with options, and is simply the best clock Workbench has seen yet. It makes use of animated icons to display hour/minute/seconds. Complete with transparent background capability. :)

New features not immediately visible

Workbench has a number of improvements that, while not immediately visible, quickly become apparent:

All memory leaks in the ReAction gadgets have been fixed, and many gadgets have vastly improved imagery (sharper/clearer, and more flexible).
Improved compatibility with Directory Opus Magellan-II. In OS 3.5, once you had run Directory Opus, you could no longer replace icons in the icon area of the "Icons/Information" window via drag 'n drop. This is now fixed.
The 'Window' menu now has a 'Find...' menu item that supports searching any currently-mounted AmigaOS device for either files or file content. Search results are displayed in a separate window and can be copied to the clipboard, drawers that search-result files are in can be opened, and case sensitivity is also supported.
The new SYS:Classes/Gadgets/string.gadget adds drag-selection of text with the mouse. A double-click selects whole words, and a triple-click selects the complete line. Unfortunately, this new functionality is only available in ReAction-based string gadgets, so GadTools string gadgets (such as that in asl file or font requesters) must resort to copying the entire contents of the string gadget via keyboard shortcut.

With Boing Bag 1, the "Workbench/Execute command..." requester now has a file selection gadget, which makes it easier to locate commands via standard file requester.

New in Boing Bag 2: a checkbox has been added to the 'Window/New Drawer' menu item's requester to allow creation of an icon for the new drawer.

A patch is now available for ToolsDaemon which solves all the problems it had when running under OS 3.9. It now works correctly with the new workbench.library API; this adds all the functionality without patching or hacks. It supports adding your own menu names, menu and sub-menu items, separator bars, and keyboard shortcuts.
Font caching is very handy, and makes heavy usage of fonts a breeze. The new installation script on the OS 3.9 second edition CDs sets this up automatically.