Getting Back To Our Roots =========================================================================== Getting Back To Our Roots Kermit Woodall kermit@novadesign.com =========================================================================== Consider this a call to arms or at least a call back to our roots. When the Amiga first launched it was the user group and developer community that got it really moving. It's been the same ever since. Marketing was never Commodore's strength. The Amiga, to so many of us, is a cause and something worth being an evangelist about. The Macintosh has its evangelists, but that was part of a deliberate campaign by it's marketing people. Just read Guy Kawasaki's (the leader of Apples professional Mac evangelists) marketing books to learn about this. It's different with the Amiga - it's simply so cool that many users can't help but become evangelists for it. We're not part of that 90% Wintel crowd. It's hard for them to ally under a name. What can they say? Whee! We're Windows95Users!? We're Compac'ters!? (there's a nasty visual image) We're PC!? (sounds like they won't let their kids play Mortal Kombat) We've got the cool, friendly, name. We're Amigans! I'm going to make some recommendations in this article. I've been around, played and worked with many operating systems, and seen how the other half (or 90%) lives. I've studied Guy's statements on getting people to become evangelists, I've seen how Team OS/2 worked for acceptance of OS/2 over Windows 95, and I've even seen a bit of how the Linux crowd works. So I'm going to steal all their ideas and throw in a few of my own and propose we do something! The Show's the Thing! These first ideas can be snapped up by Team Amiga members and User Groups everywhere. When I was part of and (for six years) ran a user group we had a couple of goals. Help our members. Get more members. One of our tactics for getting more members was to take advantage of free/mostly free tables at every single local (or near local) computer event and show. Almost every show was really focused more on PCs and other computers - but we'd show up with our Amigas (generally at least four) and run music, graphics, and demos all day long for as long as the show lasted. Our focus was to show stuff that looked better on the Amiga. This should be happening now. Team OS/2 does this, at least around here, all the time. Combining what we used to do in our user group and what I see Team OS/2 doing, I'll make the following recommendations for what you can do. Get a table for every upcoming show. Get on the mailing lists so you know about these shows in advance. Publicize on the internet, local bbs systems and local computer papers that the Amiga will be shown at these shows. Organize who will staff your table(s) and who will bring equipment. Having a regular 'staff' within your group that handles these things helps make this easier for all. Try to bring the latest and greatest Amigas around. For historical purposes having an Amiga 1000 isn't a bad idea either. (show 'em the inside cover!) Collect the video demo tapes and run these on a large monitor. My company, Nova Design, Inc., has a demo tape (free to dealers and user groups!) showing off our software. Many other companies offer the same thing. You can even find various Amiga based animators have demo tapes as well! Keep a 'journal', or a looseleaf binder, with flyers and brochures from all vendors currently supporting the Amiga. Even companies that make things like printers and scanners that work on the Amiga should be included so people can see that connection to the Amiga. Call or write every Amiga supporting vendor regularly and get their latest literature. If your club has demo copies of software, (and they should!) bring anything that's currently available and show it. Don't bring old copies of GraphicCraft and the like. People can't buy it, so if you're showing it, it's going to reinforce the Amiga is Dead fallacy. If you have old, unavailable, software on your systems you're using at the show, put their icons away during the show. Feel free to show off Newicons, MUI, MagicWB and freeware/shareware things of that nature. Just be sure you point out that these packages are available on the internet or from your clubs software library. Bring stacks of your clubs newsletters. Hey! You're promoting yourself too! Be professional, be polite, let people visiting your table get some 'hands on' experience. You don't want to dress like IBM drones. No suits and ties here. Just don't dress like other job that day is to wash your car or dog! Do be prepared to tell people where they can buy the Amiga and its software for it. If you don't have a local dealer, give them a list of mail order houses people in your club use and recommend. Do this and you'll find yourself having fun and doing something effective to promote the Amiga! See What's Developing! It's been sometime since CATS (the old Commodore sponsored developers group) died. Many people forget that the first Amiga developers group was started by a grass roots effort by the developers directly! If my, occasionally faulty, memory has it right, Mike Halverson of Impulse, pushed the formation of the first Amiga developers group. We need someone in the developer community to do this again. Why do we need a developers group? Well, it's much better than having Company X inventing a 'standard' and hoping everyone likes it - but Company Y doesn't and goes their own way. With a developer's group we could coordinate things, propose and agree on things like extensions to the IFF and ANIM standards (which need, respectively, 32-bit support and CMYK, new compression methods, sound and video interleaving, high color ANIM support and more). A developers group could also function as a registry of active developers and show programmers where to go (prehaps via a specific web site and a mailing list) for publishing direction and advice. There are many other things the developer group could do, I can't guess at half of them, so the quicker we can get this going again, the better! If you're a developer and would like to jump in on this I've setup a mailing list you can join to chat with other developers. Email newdev-request@lists.best.com and put the word SUBSINGLE in the body of the message. The subject, if you use one, will be ignored. If you need to unsubscribe later, email the same address with UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message. I'd recommend even trying to get this started formally at the Gateway Amiga'97 show in St. Louis. Email me, kermit@novadesign.com, if you're interested. If I get enough responses, the nice folks with Amiga '97will loan us some space and time. Mongering Malfeasance Muted! One goal we should all set for outselves is to reduce newsgroup rumormongering and negative chatter about the Amiga. Platform wars should be, and are, embarassing for everyone. If we can clean this sort of thing up, it will go a long way towards settling things down so we can do some serious business and have some fun too. It's not hard to identify a potential rumor, flamewar and the like. If someones news isn't prefaced by 'This was in the latest Magazine X', 'Quikpak announced this on their web site', or a similar authoritative, and verifiable source, then it's just a rumor. Respond by politely asking the poster to provide verification. In other words, 'Put up or shut up friend!'. It'll be easy to do and prehaps we can finally ignore the 'Amiga is dead' nonsense, ignore the attempts to invent news around who's buying the Amiga today, and just get back to enjoying ourselves. Now, flamewars and platform wars are different beasts, but usually if someone's posts use frequent casual profanity or freely refer to others as 'Stupid', 'Idiot' or other hot button words designed to touch off a fight, then the best way to deal with them is to politely ignore them and/or recommend ignoring them. At most, reponse politely in a manner that suggests the matter is closed and not worth continuing with. Sadly, you'll find that one of the worst sources for this is going to be former Amiga owners. They've sold their Amiga, and now they're using a soulless Wintel box, so they're out to make you feel as bad as they do. A classic sour grapes scenario. Who, What, Where, and When? Don Hicks and Amazing put out a fantastic hardware and software guide for the Amiga. Id like to propose that either one of the user groups, or companies, with a large Amiga internet web presence put up a well indexed web version that focuses on companies that are no longer focusing on their Amiga product line, but still have a warehouse full of their old Amiga products to sell. It should have listings by category, title and company. Include address, telephone, email, web addresses and product information breakdowns. A perfect example of this is The Toaster tally light from Dynamic Realities (originally sold under a different company name). They still have 'em, but they don't advertise 'em. Grab some old magazines, track some companies down, and list them! This be a guaranteed draw to the web site that hosts it. Other Neat Ideas I will be writing again in the future about some other ideas, like how to coordinate and create wild, cool, new enhancements to AmigaDOS by approaching the task as a set of small, achievable, steps that can be done by as many people that would like to be involved. This project won't require a lot of management overhead and complements other AmigaDOS efforts nicely. It will need it's own web and ftp site, some feedback from the Amiga community, and any number of programmers interested in implementing interesting new ideas in software for themselves and others. The best thing about it is that so many artists and programmers have already done much of this - the real goal will be the establishment of the web and ftp site to organize these efforts under one, dedicated, 'roof'. One of my favorite new Amiga ideas is the Siamese system. Check it out at; http://www.hiq.co.uk Ideas II - Who am I? By way of closing let's play a game. You might remember, or have heard, of this old game referenced above. Let's play it... I'm a small, stylish, 68000 based computer that comes with an advanced multitasking operating system that uses a graphical user interface environment that requires less than 128k RAM to run it and can still load lots of applications. With no aggressive company advertising I've still managed to developed an evangelistic following that has left the Windows based competition looking bloated and sluggish. After release I've gathered a strong presence on the internet as well. What computer am I? The Pilot. A palm, ie: handheld, computer from US Robotics. A company mostly known for it's modems. It weighs about 5.5oz, yes 5.5 ounces!, that runs on a Motorola 'Dragonball' processor which is based on a 16mhz 68000 series processor. The whole thing fits in your shirt pocket, has 'handwriting' recognition to let you enter information with its pen, comes with software for itself and your PC or Mac computer that allows you to maintain records on both systems that are sychronized at the touch of a single button on the Pilots cradle. Recently one of the Pilot faithful created a Linux application to sync the Pilot under Linux. Could an Amiga port of this software be far behind? For more info on the Pilot start at; http://www.usr.com/palm or; http://the-tech.mit.edu/Pilot/ or prehaps; http://pilot.org/ as well. (FYI: the 'Windows based competition' referenced above are the Windows CE palmtops. They feature a keyboard that's impossibly tiny (it's palm sized with rubber buttons) and it uses a pen - but only as a mouse. Their OS is still bloated, slow, and IMHO it's unnecessary.) TTFN That's all for this article. Email me if you have any suggestions, directions, or comments on anything above. Watch for my next article in the near future! Ta ta for now!