AROS would have achieved all the goals it’s been dragging its feet on for years long ago if the ‘junior’ staff had been able to do all this.

Thank you for your valuable work!

The only issue with AROS programming is that it takes soooo long to develop source code that does anything useful. It's very time consuming and people just aren't willing to commit themselves to it.

It may take several months or even years to develop useful source code. One advantage would be to produce source code that can be re-used for other programs or system files. That's where I am now with my projects. Much of the code can be re-used to be included in new apps.

Although my programming skills are improving there are some things I still need to learn. My annotation in my source code has improved. Now I add notations and cleanup code and fix indentation as I go. I used to wait till the end, but that never gets done! It's too much to do at the end.

There are several things I need to learn to get better at programming. I have to get much better at using GitHub. I need to gain experience writing device drivers whether for sound or graphics or peripherals such as USB or Serial connections. I also need experience writing or updating system libraries. Picture Datatypes, in a sense, are simplified libraries so I have a good start there.

Hint: there is a UART driver for AOS4 that I'm looking at. I'd like to implement something like "Waffle Reader" for AROS using USB-Serial with Poseidon USB implementation.

Vibe / AI can help a lot improving the productivity, but I recommend it only to experienced people.
The most important thing for a developer is to exercise, practice, and develop a good mindset and knowledge-base.
After that, a bot can multiply the productivity.

I have used Copilot AI recently, mostly for research to help understand certain concepts. It also provides useful code examples that actually work when included in my application and when compiled. I used it for gaussian blur research.

It does speed up the development process because I don't need to search the AROS programming database or OS4 documentation for programming. I just ask specific questions to get specific answers.

I hadn't heard of Vibe Coding before. I'll look into that. Anything that speeds up the coding process whether it is assistance with research concepts or actual code examples is a bonus! It's beneficial.

@miker1264

Great to see you are speeding up your work with using Copilot. The advantage that is frees you from searching documentation and gives you condensed answer is really a time saver. I opened a specific thread on using AI for AROS developments - if you have any hints or suggestions for other developers how to use AI, please consider posting there

It's not an icon tool exactly per the title of this thread, but in the past I started a test project that I haven't finished.

I modified Icon Library to use "Icon Alias" which substitutes the images of the currently displayed icons based on an alternate set of icons.

Like I mentioned I modified Icon Library to use alternate icons. I proved that it is possible because I was able to substitute the images based on an "Icons list" text file.

Like when we use alternate Window Themes there's a text file that indicates which theme to use. There will be a text file indicating to Icon Library which alternate icons to use.

If the icon alias text file is present then icon alias is active. Icon Library will substitute icon images of the current icons if the icon names match the names on the icons list.

For example, if the current icon is "System" and icon alias is active then Icon Library will read the icons list in the specified in the text file. If it finds "System" in the list it will substitute the icon images for the images in the alternate icon. If the icon name is not on the list, Icon Library displays the current icon as usual then goes to the next icon, etc. When the prefs text file is not present then icons display as usual.

It's an easy way to display "Icon Themes" to accompany "Window Themes" without physically changing your entire icon set. If we don't already have 'icon prefs' it might be useful as well for settings.

I believe Icon Alias deserves another look to see If I can make it work! Actually , I should rephrase that. It WORKS but now I need to clean it up and streamline & formalize it. :-)