Review: Aminet 17

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                             Review: Aminet 17
                            By:  Jason Compton 
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I'm now fully convinced it's a battle of wills.  Aminet CDs will continue
to come out in direct defiance of magazine reviewers who have already
surrendered the battle to try to come up with new, interesting ways to say
good things about them.  Urban Mueller is rubbing it in, that's all. :)

Actually, Aminet 17 has a merciful enough amount of difference from Aminet
16 to allow me to make at least a few comments.  The commercial
"coverdisk" package is back in the form of Personal Write.  This text
editor/word processor was showing its age when it appeared on Cloanto's
Personal Suite CD (the only lowlight of that otherwise excellent CD).  Now
it can only be called an anachronism.  Perhaps its most important role on
the CD is that you'll click on the "commercial" link in the typically
excellent Amigaguide interface and see ads for Cloanto's software line,
highlighted by Personal Paint 7 and the Personal Suite CD.

Aminet has received a large influx of mods and picture submissions over the
past months, and the bulk of the files are indeed mods, pictures, and
demos.  As ever, the latest Amiga Reports have been included, and the CD is
rounded out with what I can only keep referring to as the collective wisdom
of the Amiga community.

Perhaps it's been too long since the Amiga community has been reminded of
this, so I'll spell it out explicitly.  We are incredibly lucky to have
Aminet.  Not only is it a huge and reliable resource, but it has
organization which is completely alien to the large FTP archives of other
platforms.  Nowhere else have I seen anything that comes close--not in the
huge PC archives, not in the more special interest archives like those for
Psion users.  The system Aminet is organized on is nothing special: two
levels of directory hierarchy, required mini-descriptions, and a catalog of
recent files.  But it's amazing how nobody else seems to be able to pull
this off.

Anyway, enough of that.  A new Aminet Set 4 is out, we'll have coverage of
that next month.  At least those are infrequent enough that I can catch my
breath inbetween their issuances...but as Aminet grows, their frequency is
becoming more noticable...soon, I'll be at a loss for words on yet another
product...

Published by Schatztruhe

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