Amiga productivity software

The Amiga originally supported such prestigious software titles as WordPerfect, Electronic Arts' Deluxe Paint, and Lattice C. Newtek's Video Toaster, one of the first all-in-one graphics and video editing packages, began on the Amiga. The Video Toaster was one of the few accessories for the "big box" Amigas (2000, 3000 and 4000) that used the video slot and enabled users to turn their Amiga into the heart of an entire TV production suite. The later addition of the Video Flyer by Newtek made possible the first non-linear video editing program for the Amiga. The Amiga made 3D raytracing graphics available for the masses with Sculpt 3D. Before the Amiga, raytracing was only available for dedicated graphic workstations such as the SGI. Other raytracing software also included TurboSilver. The Amiga was well known for its 3D rendering capability, with many titles being added to the mix as the years went by. Some titles were later ported to Microsoft Windows and continue to thrive there, such as the rendering software Cinema 4D from Maxon, and LightWave from Newtek, which was originally part of the Video Toaster. The Video Toaster itself has even been ported to the Windows platform. LightWave was used for low-cost computer generated special effects during the early 1990s, with Babylon 5 being a notable example of a TV-series utilizing LightWave. Even Microsoft produced software for use on the Amiga. AmigaBASIC, an advanced BASIC software development environment, complete with an integrated development environment (IDE), was written by Microsoft under contract.

Amiga had its beginnings in 1985 with a strong attitude for graphics, more so than other PCs of its age due to its peculiar hardware, and its multimedia chipset. The graphical chip Agnus could access directly RAM and pilot it with DMA (Direct Memory Access) privileges, and featured Bit Blitter and Copper circuits capable to move ranges of pixels on the screen and deal directly with the electronic beam of the TV set. It could render graphic screens of various number of colors (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 and 4096 color HAM modes) starting from 320x200 up to 720x576 pixel graphic pages. Amiga released a vast number of graphics software programs, such as Graphicraft, Deluxe Paint, TVPaint, Photon Paint, Brilliance!, (a program entirely realized upon the suggestions and wishes of well known computer artist Jim Sachs), Aegis Images, ArtEffect, fxPAINT by IOSpirit, Personal Paint from Cloanto, Photogenics, Express Paint, Digi Paint, XiPaint, PerfectPaint, SketchBlock 24 bit painting program by Andy Broad for AmigaOS 4.x users.

At its beginning Amiga was considered to offer the most powerful graphic platform at a reasonable price.[3][4] It had various CAD programs available for it, such as X-CAD, IntelliCAD, DynaCaDD, MaxonCAD, IntroCAD, and even programs to design and test electronic circuits, such as ElektroCAD.

Due to the peculiar capabilities of Amiga in multimedia, and the features of the bit blitter circuit, Amiga was capable of performing advanced animation and video authoring at professional level in the 1980s and thus it was created a vast amount of software which filled also this segment of the professional video editing market. For Amiga there were available animation programs like: Aegis Animator, Lights!Camera!Action!, DeLuxe Video, Disney Animation Studio, versions later than 3 of Deluxe Paint, The Director (a BASIC-like language oriented to animation), Scala, Vision from Commodore itself, VisualFX from ClassX, Adorage Multi Effect program from proDAD, Millennium from Nova Design. ImageFX, and Art Department Pro. There been various animation software on the Amiga

Comic Setter was an interesting tools to create printed comics by arranging brushes representing comic characters, joining it with background images and superimposing it the right frames and "balloons" with their own text speech and captions. It could then print in color the comics that were created.

Disney Animation Studio was one of the most powerful 2D programs for realizing Animation. released on Amiga, this program, equipped also with a complete cell-frame preview feature was used by many animation studios worldwide at its age and still used by some several studios in Europe[lower-alpha 1] as a useful preview tool, The software is mainly used for Independent and amateur animators.

In its golden age Amiga can count on a vast range of animation and video authoring software; Aegis Animator, Lights!Camera!Action!, DeLuxe Video, Disney Animation Studio, versions later than 3 of Deluxe Paint, The Director (a BASIC-like language oriented to animation), Scala, Amiga Vision from Commodore itself, VisualFX from ClassX, Adorage Multi Effect program from proDAD, Wildfire by Andreas Maschke (ported by author to Java later), Millennium from Nova Design, ImageFX from Nova Design, and Art Department Pro.

3D rendering and animation software includes Sculpt 3D, TurboSilver, Aladdin4D, Videoscape 3D, Caligari, Maxon Cinema4D, Imagine, LightWave from Newtek, Real3D from Realsoft, Vista Pro, World Construction Set 3D terrain rendering programs, and Tornado3D by the Italian company Eyelight.

Amiga was one of the first commercial computer platform to allow amateur and professional video editing, due to its capability in connecting to TV sets, Video codecs and deal with Chroma-Key, Genlock signal, at full screen with overscan features, and a good noise-gain ratio. Amiga and its video peripherals (mainly Genlock boxes and digitizing boxes) in the nineties were available at reasonable prices and then this made the Amiga to become one of the professional video market leader platforms. It was also capable of dealing with broadcast video production (Newtek VideoToaster), and in the age around the 1992–1994, despite of the Commodore demise, Amiga knew its golden age as a professional video platform and there were available for Amiga a vast amount of any kind of video software, graphic facilities and reselling of any of GFX and image gallery data files that could be applied to video productions. Amongst these software it is worth mentioning the main Amiga video-editing programs for desktop video with both linear and non linear editing with 4.2.2 capabilities as the ones from Newtek available with VideoToaster Flyer external module for Video Toaster and just called NLE! (Non Linear Editing), Amiga MainActor, Broadcaster 32 and Elite (with Producer software), Wildfire by Andreas Maschke for vfx (now in Java), expansion Amiga cards PAR, VLab Motion (with Movishop software) and VLab Pro.

While desktop video proved to be a major market for the Amiga, a surge of word processing, page layout and graphic software filled out the professional needs starting from the first Amiga text program Textcraft which was a mix between a real word processor and an advanced text editor, but capable of changing page layouts, fonts, enlarging or reducing their width, changing their colors and adding color images to the text.

Notable word processing programs for Amiga included the then-industry standard WordPerfect up to version 4.1, Shakespeare, Excellence, Maxon Word, Final Writer, Amiga Writer, Scribble!, ProWrite, Wordworth and the little Personal Write by Cloanto.

The page layout software included Page Setter and Professional Page from Gold Disk Inc., and PageStream by Soft-Logik, known today as Grasshopper LLC. Only PageStream was ported to other platforms and continues to be developed and supported by the developers. Graphic software included vector drawing applications like Art Expression from Soft-Logik, ProVector by Stylus, Inc. (formerly Taliesin), Draw Studio, and Professional Draw from Gold Disk Inc.

Amiga lacked an office suite as the term is meant now, but integrated software was available. Pen Pal was a word processor integrated with a database and a form editor. Scribble!, Analyze! and Organize! were bundled together as the Works! suite combining a word processor, spreadsheet and database. Despite the similarity in name, it had no connection to Microsoft Works.

The page layout language LaTeX was available in two ports: AmigaTeX, which is no longer available (the first LaTeX can be edited with a front end program), and PasTEX, available on Aminet repository.

Modern software AbiWord is available today on AmigaOS 4.0 through the AmiCygnix X11 graphical engine, Scriba and Papyrus Office pre-release is available for MorphOS.

In the first age of Amiga (1986–1989) there were cross-platform spreadsheets available, such as MaxiPlan, which was available also for MS-DOS and Macintosh. Logistix (real name LoGisTiX), one of the first spreadsheets for Amiga, Microfiche Filer Plus was a database which gave the user the experience of exploring data as using microfilms. SuperBase was one of the finest programs available for C64. It was then ported on Atari, Amiga, and later on PC. But on Amiga, it would become a standard reference, available in two versions Superbase Personal and SuperBase Professional It could handle SQL databases and had a query internal language such as BASIC. It was capable of creating forms and masks on records and handling multimedia files into its records years before Microsoft Access. Superbase also featured VCR control style buttons to browse records of any database. Softwood File II was another simple multimedia database which then evolved into Final Data, a good database available for Amiga from Softwood Inc. From the same firm there was Final Calc, a very powerful spreadsheet, similar to TurboCalc from the German company Schatztruhe. ProChart was a tool to draw flow charts and diagrams. Analyze! was a fairly full featured (for the time) spreadsheet developed for the Amiga. Organize! was a flat file database package. Gnumeric spreadsheet has also been ported on Amiga through an X11 engine called AmiCygnix.

In recent times MUIbase was born and mainly cross-platform MySQL database language became a reference on Amiga also. SQLite, a self-contained, embeddable, zero-configuration SQL database engine, can also be found available on AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS.

In February 2010, Italian programmer Andrea Palmatè ported IODBC standard to AmigaOS 4.

Maple V is one of the best general purpose mathematics software (a.k.a. Mathematic-CAD) ever made. It was available for Amiga also, and appreciated by many scientists using Amiga in its time. Distant Suns, Galileo, Digital Almanac and Amiga Digital Universe (from Bill Eaves for the OS4) were stellar sky exploring programs and astronomic calculators. During the age of CDTV many historic, science, and art CDs like Timetable of Science, Innovation, Timetable of Business, Politics, Grolier's Encyclopedia, Guinness Disk of Records, Video Creator, American Heritage Dictionary, Illustrated Holy Bible, Illustrated Works of Shakespeare, etc. were available.