Dear Friends and users of my programs!

Once again, a further year is almost over and I want to write you what happened interesting from my point of view.

First of all, my studies go on well so far (I'm now in the 5. semester) but it consumes more time than I want. This causes sometimes a signifficantly time-delay for programming works and/or writing eMails. I have to apologize for this, but my studies must have top-prioritiy.

This summers semester holidays I wanted to use every free hour for programming - I did so and had a great progress with my programming projects.
First of all, my WizardClasses, a C++ object oriented development system got a major update allowing me to develop my other programs in a more efficient way.
I have planned to release this system in the middle of next year to the public to allow also other programmers to use this system.

The first remarkable release of this year was my new FrameMachine driver-system "FMdriver", which was accepted very well by users of the FrameMachine video board.
With FMdriver it is now possible to watch TV on the Workbench, full PowerPC-support for superfast color-conversion included.

After this, I planned to finish ArtecScan 2.0 - the scanner-driver for Artec scanners. Because of my just updated WizardClasses it was possible to do this with more speed than usual.
But then happened the worst-case for every programmer: my system- harddrive got defective and I lost all of my data (source-codes, eMails, all other data).
With the help of Petra Struck from the German "AmigaNews" who posted my search for an identical harddrive and of Hendrik Hanke who borrowd me his harddrive I restored all my lost data by replacing my defective harddrive controller board. Thanks again!!

Well, this event had cost me about two weeks of programming work and my semester holidays were over. ArtecScan once again could not be finished... :(
Well, of course I tried to go on with ArtecScan-development but because of this I needed some weeks longer to finish this work.

The results of my work I demonstrated on a small computershow named "Computronika" at the end of october in Germany.
After this I made the alpha version of ArtecScan available to the public over my homepage.

After releasing ArtecScan, I wrote also a FrameMachine driver for the indepentent video-driver system (VHI) of Felix Schwarz.

Two weeks later, there was the most important Amiga event of this year, the HomeElectronicsWorld'99 in Cologne. I was there of course, too and met there with a lot of people. It was a great show and it is clear that the Amiga is still alive!

I will go on using/programming the Amiga, I hope you too! If Haage&Partner and AmigaInc. do the right thing, we could have a very good computer at the end of next year.