Ambient (desktop environment)

Ambient

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 (2005)[1]
Stable release 1.1599 / June 8, 2008 (2008-06-08)[2]
Written in C
Operating system MorphOS
Type Desktop environment
License GNU General Public License
Website morphosambient.sf.net

Ambient is a MUI-based desktop environment for MorphOS. 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.

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.

Ambient is localized for various languages and while 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.[3]

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
Colours 4 8 256 256 16M 16M 16M 16M
Alpha blending No No No No Yes Yes Yes Yes
Icon size N/A N/A 36×40 46×46 46×46 128×128 128×128 128×128
Second state image Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No No Yes
Embedded metadata Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes

Development status

In 2005 David Gerber released Ambient source code under GPL[1] and is now developed by the Ambient development team.

See also

References

  1. 1 2 "Ambient". Retrieved 2008-11-21.
  2. ambient.notes
  3. "MorphOS: The Lightning OS". 2006-11-22. Retrieved 2010-09-04.

External links

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