Tone Byte

Riding the Amiga Wave.



BIT ONE: IBrowse in the works?

Those eagerly awaiting the newest version of one of the two competing modern Amiga web browsers got a big boost if they monitored the Amiga newsgroups last week. This reply was posted by what looks like an employee of HiSoft named Stephen Marriott. He stated that Omnipresence is working on adding inline MPEG, QT, AVI, and VRML support, extensive plugin API for all types of plugins, and support for JavaScript to IBrowse. Amiga owners stand to benefit greatly from the battle of the Amiga web browsers. With IBrowse, Voyager, and AWeb dueling it out to be the best, we should see Gates Crate quality browsers real soon now.

Stick to this magazine for reviews of this product when it becomes available.

Contributed by: Anthony Becker

BIT TWO: More Weirdness in the Acquisition of Amiga Technologies by Gateway 2000

As if two protracted bankruptcy proceedings weren't enough, now another company is claiming equal rights to the Amiga. You all might remember that while Escom was in business Amiga Technologies sold a license to Rightiming Electronics for manufacture of Amigas for the Far East. Well, this company has decided to sell this to a New Jersey company named Lotus Pacific, Inc. This does not sit well, however, with Gateway 2000, who feel that this license was invalidated by the sale of Amiga Technologies and have added a Certificate of Authenticity to appear on official copies of the AmigaOS and issued the following:

From owner-amiga@gw2kbbs.com Thu Jul 24 11:35 CDT 1997

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

As owner of all Amiga, Inc. patent rights worldwide, we at Gateway 2000 want to clarify a recent story on the apparent sale of all Amiga patents, trademarks and copyrights by Rightiming Electronics to Lotus Pacific, Inc. for use in China, Taiwan, Macao and the bordering countries between China and the former Soviet Union.

Rightiming purports to hold a license to manufacture Amigas and has apparently attempted to sell this purported license to Lotus Pacific. We dispute their license, their right to sell any license, and we dispute any claims they have made with respect to Amiga patents, copyrights, or trademarks. Gateway 2000 owns all Amiga patents, copyrights and trademarks worldwide and will continue to license Amiga technology to qualified companies.

Contributed by: Anthony Becker, Executive Editor

BIT THREE: mNews fix

Many people ask, "Anthony, how do you get so much information from the net?". The key to this is the newsgroups. There is where people pass on information to each other in huge, globe-spanning, discussion groups. An Amiga program that has come to the fore in this arena has long been mNews. A program that allows you to read, write and reply to the different groups available to you from your Internet Service Provider. This one has been so popular due to its features, interface, and availability on Aminet. It has also had two major flaws: a memory leak a mile wide, and slow movement from article to article. Heavy Amiga Internet user Robert Calabro came up with a fix for these two flaws. One day he accidentally deleted his ENV drawer from RAM:. This is where your Amiga's OS stores settings. These two flaws vanished and he set out to find the culprit. It turned out to be a file called TZ in the ENV drawer. Simply delete this file before loading mNews and you will see an immediate speed change and far less memory leaks. Thank you Robert for passing on this information to mNews users everywhere.

Contributed by: Anthony Becker, Executive Editor

BIT FOUR: New MBench:

Just an FYI, there is a new version on Mbench on Aminet. I reviewed this in a previous Tone Byte. Mbench is a Workbench add-on that takes the Amiga's GUI to the modern level by adding multithreading. This gives you the ability to perform multiple drag-and-drop operations. This latest version now adds compatibility with ToolsDaemon, the premier tools menu configuration utility. Previous versions would kick out ToolsDaemon as it patched the system. This is a utility to watch, by:

Mark Hewitt
MBench
Church Farm House
Cublington Road
Aston Abbotts
Bucks
HP22 4NB
England
cs95MAH@exeter.ac.uk
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/1258/mbench.html#

Contributed by: Anthony Becker, Executive Editor

-Edited by Anthony Becker-
Write to him with comments or submissions at e-mail address: commodoreuser@juno.com