Ambient (desktop environment)
Ambient is a MUI-based desktop environment for MorphOS.[3] Its development was started in 2001 by David Gerber. Its main goals were that it should be fully asynchronous, simple and fast. Ambient remotely resembles Workbench and Directory Opus Magellan trying to mix the best of both worlds.
 A screenshot of the desktop with a panel on the bottom | |
| Original author(s) | David Gerber |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Ambient Open Source Team |
| Initial release | 2005[1] |
| Stable release | 1.1599
/ June 8, 2008[2] |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | MorphOS |
| Type | Desktop environment |
| License | GNU General Public License |
| Website | morphosambient |
Features
Ambient does not strictly follow the Amiga Workbench interface paradigm but there are still many similarities: while programs are called tools, program attributes are called tooltypes, data files are projects and directories are drawers.
- support for ARexx scripting language
- default icon library for hundreds of fileformats
- fully asynchronous, multi-threaded design
- fast asynchronous file I/O functions and file notifications
- support for PNG and other Amiga icon formats
- built-in icon, workbench and wbstart libraries
- built-in applications like disk formatting and commodities manager
- panels which are used as program launchers
Ambient is localized for various languages and while it is part of MorphOS, it is also available separately. There are various visual effects in Ambient which are taking an advantage of hardware accelerated visual effects in MorphOS.[4]
Desktop icons
The native icon format in Ambient is a PNG icon but there is built-in support for other Amiga icon formats. Ambient introduced special icon format called DataType Icons where the icon is simply any image file renamed to include .info extension. Those icons are read using Amiga DataType system.
| Original Amiga icons | MagicWB | NewIcons | GlowIcons | GlowIcons32 | DT Icons | PNG | DualPNG | SVG | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Colours | 4 | 8 | 256 | 256 | 16M | 16M | 16M | 16M | 16M |
| Alpha blending | No | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Not sure |
| Icon size | — | — | 36×40 | 46×46 | 46×46 | 128×128 | 128×128 | 128×128 | 128x128 |
| Second state image | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | No |
| Embedded metadata | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Not sure |
Development status
In 2005, David Gerber released Ambient source code under GPL[1] and it is now developed by the Ambient development team.
See also
References
- "Ambient". Retrieved 2008-11-21.
- "Ambient Open Source Team - shorted ambient.notes". morphosambient.sourceforge.net.
- http://morphos.de/files/src/3.11//ambient.tar.bz2 Source code of MorphOS 3.11
- "MorphOS: The Lightning OS". 2006-11-22. Archived from the original on 2011-07-25. Retrieved 2010-09-04.