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; 19 years ago (2005)[1]
Stable release	1.1599 / June 8, 2008; 15 years ago (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.^[3] 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.

• support for ARexx scripting language
• default icon library for hundreds of fileformats
• fully asynchronous, multi-threaded design
• fast asynchronous file I/O functions and file notifications
• support for PNG and other Amiga icon formats
• built-in icon, workbench and wbstart libraries
• built-in applications like disk formatting and commodities manager
• panels which are used as program launchers

Ambient is localized for various languages and while it is 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.^[4]

Desktop icons

The native icon format in Ambient is PNG, but there is built-in support for other Amiga icon formats. Ambient introduced a special icon format called DataType Icons where the icon is simply any image file renamed to include the .info extension. Those icons are read using the Amiga DataType system.

Development status

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