| The following is extracted from AMReport (edition 1.11) which is a
newsletter which appears on usenet. CBM expects to ship its 3 millionth
Amiga in the next month or two. Isn't Apple up around 5-6 million Macs?
I'll upload the recent editions of this newsletter to eot:: and announce
it in the uploads note.
-Dom
DevCon Keynote Address
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The following text file on the just finished Denver DevCon was released
to the press.
1991 Amiga Developer's Conference, Denver, Colorado
Keynote Address
Jeff Scherb
Vice President, Applications & Technical Support
A lot has happened since we were together last year at the Atlanta
Devcon. I spent a great deal of time thinking about this year's
keynote address, and in going over the events of the past year,
I was very surprised to see how much we at Commodore and you as
developers have accomplished. We often lose sight of the progress
of the war because of our particular daily battle, and I think it's
worthwhile to take a few minutes to review what we've accomplished
over the last year.
It's been a very good year for us.
- We are now getting the press coverage we deserve. The Amiga is
finally being recognized as a powerful and cost-effective
alternative to the PC and Macintosh. We are getting noticed
by the professional computing community.
- The A3000 is shipping in volume. The recent "A3000 Power Up" sales
promotion run by Commodore in the US has exceeded all of our
expectations, and has, in fact, resulted in a backlog of
orders for the machine.
- The A500 continues to gain momentum, particularly in Europe.
Many believe that the 500 is now poised to repeat the success
of the Commodore 64.
- CDTV is shipping, to tremendous press reviews. Over 100 titles
are already available for the machine. The press now defines
the "interactive multimedia player" machine generically as
CDTV, rather than CD-I as it did a year ago. We are now the
leader that the "other guys" have to follow.
- We are now shipping Amiga running AT&T System V, Release 4 UNIX.
This is one of the earliest commercial implementations of
V.4, and our implementation includes Open Look and color
X Windows running on the University of Lowell graphics card.
Over 150 applications are already available for the machine.
- The A3000T "tower" machine is now shipping - this elevates
Amiga expandability and performance to new levels.
- AmigaDOS 2.0 is now finished, and ROMS are being manufactured.
- Over 1000 developers are registered in the CATS-US Developer
support program. Over 500 are registered in the support
program in Europe. This is a significant increase over last
year.
- There are more developers attending this year's developer
conference than last year.
- Commodore continues to be profitable, and just closed the fiscal
year at over $1 billion, for the first time since the '64 days.
- In the next month or two, we expect to ship the 3 millionth
Amiga!
So we all have good reason to reflect back on the year since the
last developer's conference and feel very good about our
accomplishments.
There's much more coming, in terms of new hardware and software,
and we'll tell you about some of them over the course of this
week's conference. I won't steal the thunder of the session
speakers by giving you any details now.
Let's turn to the present - where should you developers focus
your efforts to make 1992 an even better year?
- First, make sure you are strong in the areas of the world
where Commodore is strong. You will see from our annual
report that Commodore does about 85 percent of its business
in Europe. If you don't have good European distribution,
or your product is not available in the local European
languages, you are missing out on a very large market.
- Support AmigaDOS 2.0 now! The time has come. We will be
shipping machines with 2.0 in ROM very soon, and the time
for you to release 2.0 compatible upgrades is now, if you
haven't done it already.
- Continue your focus on quality. In general, Amiga software
is of much better quality now than it was a year ago, but
we all need to continually focus on quality.
CATS is here to help you. That's the only reason we exist.
Please take advantage of the services we offer. This year,
CATS has released more developer tools and documentation than
in any other year. Here are a few examples:
- The User Interface Style Guide will help you create more
intuitive, easy to use, and standard user interfaces, for
your applications.
- The Application Installer, available from CATS for free
distribution with your applications, provides a standard
and simple way for your users to install their applications
on their hard disks. Use it. Plan to attend the session
this week covering this new tool.
- AppShell, a development tool designed to serve as a sample
application and a basis for the event processing code in
your applications, is available now. Take advantage of
this tools to speed you application development.
- The ARexx development guide will help you add this important
interprocess language capability to your applications. You can
buy this manual at the Devcon Store this week.
- We now have AmigaGuide, a hypertext development and runtime
system, available to you for inclusion in your applications.
Using this tool, you can easily add hotkey hypertext-linked
help text to your applications. Be sure to attend the
session on AmigaGuide to learn all about this new tool.
- Most of the 2.0 ROM Kernel Reference Manuals are finished
and either are available now at the Devcon Store, or
are in the final printing stages at Addison-Wesley.
- How many of you are using Enforcer and Mungwall? Why didn't
everyone raise their hands? Every developer should be using
these debugging tools as part of their normal routine. MS-DOS
and Mac developers can only dream of powerful tools like
this, since they can't be implemented on those primitive
computers. Make sure you take advantage of these tools.
CATS has quite a few other projects in the work to help make
you more productive in developing applications:
- As I said before, if you're not in Europe, you need to be.
"Crossing Borders," a new reference book to be available
from CATS early this fall, takes a "cookbook" approach to
getting to Europe. How do you get distribution? Support?
Translation of your manuals and programs? Crossing Borders
is the manual that will help you answer these questions.
Make sure you get your copy as soon as they're ready.
- We're putting the Amiga developer docs on CD-ROM, using
our own AmigaGuide hypertext system. Using this you'll
be able to integrate this online reference to the Amiga
operating system and hardware into your favorite text
editor; you can call up OS function definitions while
you're programming, and using the cut-and-paste features,
move examples directly from the documentation into your code.
This should be available sometime this fall, and you can see
a demo of it this week in the hardware lab.
- We're arranging special Developer/Distributor meetings to
help you meet the European distributors and gain distribution
in Europe. The first of these will be held this year at
Amiga '91 Cologne, the largest Amiga show in the world. Last
year, this show drew 60,000 people. You'll be getting a
mailing from CATS with information on these meetings next week.
We've got a great Devcon planned for you; let's look at some of the
highlights:
- Several sessions on new hardware are being held today;
- we have a lot of detailed CDTV sessions for you;
- a presentation by a translation service that can help you
move your applications to Europe;
- several sessions by Commodore's US marketing department, to
help you understand where we're going from a marketing point
of view in the US;
- a session on finding the right European distributor, by
CATS Applications Manager, Europe, Wolfgang Trompetter;
- and many other technical hardware and software sessions.
Enjoy the conference; make the most of it; CATS is here to
help you.
Thank you.
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