Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!decwrl!adobe!bezanson
From: bezanson@adobe.COM (Brian Bezanson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Prototyper
Message-ID: <1009@adobe.UUCP>
Date: 24 Jul 89 22:06:13 GMT
References: <89072022020433@masnet.uucp> <7443@cg-atla.UUCP>
Reply-To: bezanson@adobe.UUCP (Brian Bezanson)
Organization: Adobe Systems Incorporated, Mountain View
Lines: 36

In article <7443@cg-atla.UUCP> hildreth@cg-atla.UUCP (Lon Hildreth) writes:
>I spent some time with Prototyper the other day.  When I was drawing my
>first dialog, I got a Bus Error.  Twice.  If you don't give a dialog the
>right name when you create it, it can't be changed.  I accidently created
>a dialog as a window.  There's no way to change its window type.  I had
>to delete it and redraw the entire dialog contents.  When I canceled out
>of the Load Resource dialog, it bombed with an Illegal Instruction.

I haven't had a lot of errors - try version 2.1
To change a windows name/type, select the menu option or type command-W to
change them.

>Prototyper provides absolutely no code for standard menu items.  AppMaker,
>a recently released code generator from Bowers Development, provides a lot
>of code for standard menu items.  Some of it, of course, has to be application
>specific.  Prototyper generated code is a lot more obscure, cryptic, and 
>harder to read than AppMaker generated code.

The demo of AppMaker didn't impress me because the interface and features
of ProtoTyper were nicer (tool palatte, grid for drags). In this way,
ProtoTyper is a nicer version of ResEdit for cleaning up dialogs. I use
ProtoTyper more for the resource creation and building demos. I haven't
seen AppMaker have the ability to produce a runtime demo.

>I cannot recommend a product that crashes as often as Prototyper does.  For
>whatever it's worth, I was running it on IIcx.  Mayber it's friendlier on
>other machines.  If it weren't for the crashes, it would be a nice prototyping
>environment.  I would not use the generated code, though.  But it allows you

I haven't had as many major crashes as you infer on my IIcx. I think
ProtoTyper is a great time saver if you don't try and make it the end
all in programming. But for doing quick mockups, creating resources, and
flipping a Mac interface onto code samples, it does the job.

--------
Brian Bezanson				bezanson@adobe.com