Dear friends and users of my programs!

Yet again I want to use the opportunity to write down a short summary of my personal year 2003. I have discovered that in some ways already today it is quite interesting for me to look back to the christmas / new year greetings of the last years and to read what happened to me back then. Some day the collection of these greetings could work as some sort of personal diary... ;-)

Well, what happened to me in 2003? The short answer is: Quite a lot!
The long answer needs - what a surprise - a little bit more text... :-)

After finishing my studies, I started to search for a suitable job - this search surprisingly was quite short and I became an interesting job offer by a company located near Stuttgart. After signing the contract of employment, it was necessary to leave the place where I've spent the last years to do my studies - Regensburg.
Leaving Regensburg was not easy for me as I have got some very good friends there... but well, there was no chance to avoid it. To make the left a bit easier, I invited my closest and very best friends to a goodbye-meal in a pub in Regensburg.
After that, I spent some weeks at my parents home where I prepared and organized my move. Most important of all was to find an appartment; with some help of my company I've found a nice little appartment which is located very near to my company in Gerlingen. Following, I had to buy the furniture and all the other stuff you need in a household.
The next big deal was of course my move to Gerlingen. This step was combined with a lot of work as the transporter had to be filled emptied, the furniture be moved etc. etc. Without the great help of my family the whole transaction would have been near to impossible for me alone.
After that, I started working for my new employer. My initial small fear about probably finding not a good contact to my colleagues was completely unfounded. The opposite happened: I am very excited about having found a group of really pleasant and competent people. Being in such an environment, it is far more easy to deal with the stress which naturally is combined with a project of our type.
The project will result in a very interesting class of products basing on a realtime OS and a 32Bit RISC-CPU. The technologies used in this project are very advanced and I'm very happy that my own personal projects I have worked on within the last years are a very helpful basis for my today's work.

Due to the huge amount of time I've spent in my company, I have not had very much chance to make big steps with my private projects. The most important private project without doubts is my work on some components of AmigaOS 4.0. This operating system has made really impressive steps within 2003 and I'm looking forward to the official release. Addtitionally to AmigaOS, there is another interesting OS - MacOS X. The version 10.3 alias 'Panther' definitely was an impressive update and makes the technology advantage compared to other big operating systems (Windows, Linux, ...) once again bigger.
To compare AmigaOS with MacOS X does not make much sense as the development of AmigaOS was frozen for several years. However, AmigaOS is a much more scalable operating system as it also has the potential to run also on weak CPUs. Additional to that, it needs far less memory but still provides a very powerful API which allows to drive a wide range of applications.
My decision is to support both operating systems in the future with smaller and greater applications. Some interesting things I'm already working on but it still is too early to talk more about it.

A last note at the end: I have to say thousand times sorry for the delays with answering the flood of mails waiting in my inbox. I will try to answer most of them within the next weeks as good as possible.