Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!ames!think!husc6!wjh12!clp
From: clp@wjh12.harvard.edu (Charles L. Perkins)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Saw Release 0.981 and here's some news about it...
Message-ID: <393@wjh12.harvard.edu>
Date: 6 Sep 89 05:45:48 GMT
Reply-To: clp@wjh12.UUCP (Charles L. Perkins)
Organization: Harvard University, Cambridge MA
Lines: 52

Tonight at the NeXT Boston Computer Society Meeting there was a system engineer
 from NeXT who showed us Release 0.981 (N.B. < 1.0) which is one of the asymp-
 totic sequence on the way to 1.0 (0.99999....).  He said 1.0 was due last week
 of Sept. or first week of Oct. and sounded serious about the statement).

New features:

  (1) Preferences -- a new timezone setting feature that is super-cool; it
	  shows the world map and allows you to click/drag timezone regions
	  (not just strips, the REAL zone) across the world to set your locale.
	-- a new Panel that allows you to place ALL application top-level
	  menus at some other location than the upper left, set the default
	  font, etc.
	-- many new Icons/formats for the old panels (some nice, some strange)

  (2) Digital Webster and Librarian have a new look but ~ same functionality.

  (3) Sound editor and voice-edit in Mail app now show your voice "bouncing"
	a strip in real time so you can "see" yourself recording.

  (4) Monsterscope plus the Spectrum Analyzer is back in the standard distrib.

  (5) BreakApp (and others) give you full musical control over sound tweaking
	in real time (play with timbre, decay, etc.).

  (6) A really beautiful real-time Algebra front-end for Mathematica was shown
	that allowed changed a,b,c,d parameters for all sorts of equations and
	M. would recalculate in real time new results; for educational uses.

  (7) Saw a beautiful side-by-side demo of Mandelbrot Set being calculated by
	68030 and DSP (DSP seemed 3-6 times faster, depending on the complexity
	of the region of M. Set being displayed).

  (8) Saw a topology lab tool that displayed 3-d shaded objects from Math.
	descriptions of their shape; somewhat slow (30-50 polygons/sec) but
	nice looking and still wonderful for deforming/playing with shapes.

  (9) Saw a beautiful marbled chess board and 3-d chess pieces as a front-end
	to GNU Chess;  piece movement seemed really nice.  [DAMN! I was going
	to do exactly this as a free software hack....but it's nice to know
	people at NeXT are serious about GNU, too!]

And their were MANY others demos and new things I couldn't play with but
 saw in the browser...  there are claimed performance enhancements in Math.
 and in the system overall (not all that obvious to me).  This release is not
 generally available, and is only an internal version, but it really encouraged
 me about the Look and Feel of 1.0.....it was very nice with lots of new good
 stuff, so I wait with bated breath for my own copy of this and more....

							With a NeXT at last,

								    Charles