Questions about NeoDesk have popped up lately and with the announcement by Dan Wilga that he's released the source code for both, there will most likely be renewed interest. NeoDesk is a feature packed desktop replacement and Geneva gives it a co-operative multitasking environment. It's a very powerful combo and I used it quite a bit, back in the day.
I grabbed a backup copy I had from when I was running it around 1998-1999 and set it up on a 1 gig SD card. I ran this from my Mega STe and it booted up perfectly. I had forgotten how much I had done with it. With everything running on my 4 meg Mega STe, I still had a little over 3 megs of RAM free.
Here's a screenshot:
Oh, BTW - the website where you can download the latest versions is here:
https://gribnif.github.io/
I was playing around with NeoDesk/Geneva a bit today and grabbed some more screenshots after adjusting the color palette (I tend to like somber colors more than gaudy).
Main desktop:
C drive open:
NeoDesk allows you to form "groups" that you can put on the main desktop. Here are all my non-loaded ACC's (desk accessories), neatly kept in one group folder:
So the interesting thing is that normally, the TOS desktop only allows 6 ACC's. You can see I've got 5 loaded up here:
With NeoDesk/Geneva, the number of ACC's you can have active is only limited by memory. Here, you can see I've now got 8 active. The cool thing is, I just open up that group folder with all my non-loaded ACC's in it that I showed above, double-click on one, and it's instantly added to the drop-down menu list. Neat, huh? You can also remove them and make them non-active again.
Here's a few games, loaded into another group that's stored on the main desktop.
NeoDesk/Geneva has it's own built-in help system:
Here's another cool feature. Let's say you're sitting at your computer and you're on the phone with someone and you need to jot down their phone number but you don't have a pen or paper. No problem my friend - simply double-click on the NeoDesk desktop and you can type in whatever you want, any where on the main section. It's just as easy to remove when you're finished with it.
The NeoDesk/Geneva combo really is a powerful replacement for your Atari computer. Now that it's been released as freeware, there's no really good reason not to give it a try. Do yourself a favor and check it out. 😉
I have watched the videos of that guy reviewing all the st stuff. I think the channel is called commodore does not compute. I think he has image files of what he was using.
He did a Geneva and neodesk video. I really wanted to try it out whenever I can find time but didn't want to spend hours setting it up.