Is anyone even working on any projects utilizing A5? Just wondering... even the "The Depot" sub-forum where members talked about their projects seems to be gone.

No. And nobody is working on the Allegro code either. This is the marketing department after all.

That tells me it was a joke.

Allegro is a little understaffed, so we welcome help... I wouldn't say it's abandoned (or close to it). E.g. a listing of the past few months of commits:

2014-03-23  vkensou           [win] Fix for al_get_standard_path with unicode.
2014-03-20  Trent Gamblin     Make real fullscreen modes work on OS X again. May not be perfect still. Thanks SDL.
2014-03-19  Trent Gamblin     Remove some code (Android only) that was supposed to be a fix for some older Android devices that didn't support certain te
2014-03-19  Trent Gamblin     Allow adding (.exe) suffix to Raspberry Pi toolchain programs
2014-03-15  SiegeLord         Clarify what al_update_display_region does in case the driver does not support this feature.
2014-03-15  SiegeLord         Fix typo in documentation of al_wait_for_event_timed
2014-02-28  SiegeLord         Clarify the documentation of al_calculate_arc.
2014-02-25  Peter Wang        android: Set correct orientation at startup.
2014-02-23  SiegeLord         Add a collinear polyline test
2014-02-23  SiegeLord         Fix some more sharp-angle polyline drawing bugs.
2014-02-23  SiegeLord         Fix uni- and bi-directional looping of zero-length samples.
2014-02-22  SiegeLord         Fix incorrect rendering of sharp angles with thick polylines.
2014-02-17  SiegeLord         Rephrase the documentation of ALLEGRO_PRIM_QUALITY
2014-01-31  SiegeLord         Switch to using unicode windows.
2014-01-25  SiegeLord         Do not check for the D3D device being lost up to 1000 times per second.
2014-02-03  Peter Wang        cmake: Add deps folders to CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH *or* CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH.
2014-02-02  Elias Pschernig   [OSX] Fixed/avoided all sound examples freezing...
2014-01-18  Ben Davis         cmake: Add deps folders to CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH, not CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH.
2014-01-14  SiegeLord         Clarify that the output of al_draw_pixel doesn't get bigger/smaller when transformed
2014-01-12  Peter Wang        Bump version to 5.1.9 (GIT).
2014-01-12  Peter Wang        Bump version to 5.1.8 (WIP).
2014-01-12  Peter Wang        Prepare summary of changes for 5.1.8.
2014-01-12  Peter Wang        docs: Use tempnam instead of tmpnam in make_doc.
2014-01-12  Peter Wang        docs: Delete Windows path workaround for older versions of Pandoc.
2014-01-12  Peter Wang        docs: Add make_doc --pandoc option and use it.
2014-01-12  Peter Wang        docs: Allow for .exe suffix in pandoc version detection regexp.
2014-01-09  SiegeLord         Use the texture dimensions to compute the half-pixel shift.
2014-01-09  SiegeLord         Do not apply the half-pixel shift to proj_transform itself.
2014-01-08  SiegeLord         Move the 0.5 pixel shift into _al_hlsl_set_projview_matrix.
2014-01-08  SiegeLord         Remove #version specifier from all shaders.
2014-01-08  SiegeLord         Move the half-pixel shift in D3D into the projection matrix.
2014-01-08  SiegeLord         Add a note about vertex/index buffers being liable to fail on lower-end GPUs
2014-01-08  SiegeLord         Fix a crash in ex_prim when vertex buffer creation fails.
2014-01-07  Trent Gamblin     set _WIN32_WINNT version to Windows XP to get DirectSound 8 (Markus Henschel)
2014-01-07  Trent Gamblin     Use lazy initialization for thread local state object (Markus Henschel)

My patch was never accepted ...

Did you submit it here... or on the actual Allegro dev list?

Truth.

Bump.

I know, these days it's all Windows 8, boring flatness. I'm not interested in modern perversions.

It's not only Windows but other companies. I still remember when I liked the Windows XP GUI, now I look at it and think "Oh my god". I think it's about changing, there is nothing bad in changing.

Code::Blocks also changed their logo. They went from something like this:

{"name":"2d9eah1.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/b\/8\/b822184ecc9e294bd288db70a50aa5af.png","w":450,"h":240,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/b\/8\/b822184ecc9e294bd288db70a50aa5af"}

to this:

{"name":"608471","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/0\/3\/03b32007c5799225ddc4989187795320.png","w":661,"h":283,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/0\/3\/03b32007c5799225ddc4989187795320"}

The glow of the previous version was incredible amateur.

There is also Google.

{"name":"logo11w.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/8\/58ccd552e22f0c86c64f8560e04ddc39.png","w":538,"h":190,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/8\/58ccd552e22f0c86c64f8560e04ddc39"}

Etc, etc...

I have nothing against change... but I am quite a bit against change just because everybody else is doing it, especially if they are all going the same direction... that's called being a lemming .

EDIT: I just looked a bit online about this, and look what I came up upon:

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2013/07/flat-design-casts-a-long-shadow/

If this isn't a definition of a bandwagon, I don't know what is. Should we add a long shadow to the Allegro logo because everybody is doing it?

When you created that image you was also being a Lemming, typical shadows, glows, depth and even colors, the problem is that you got stuck in the lemmings' tendency of the 90's. At least I'm a 2014 lemming. And yhea I like the fresh style of these new logos...