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From: silverio@brahms.berkeley.edu (C J Silverio)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Does an interface builder exist?
Message-ID: <1989Nov30.165103.5229@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 30 Nov 89 16:51:03 GMT
References: <1703@accuvax.nwu.edu> <5510@internal.Apple.COM> <2574B4DF.16345@paris.ics.uci.edu>
Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator;;;;ZU44)
Reply-To: silverio@brahms.berkeley.edu.UUCP (C J Silverio)
Organization: Bath Department, UC Merkeley
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In article <1703@accuvax.nwu.edu> schwartz@gumball.ils.nwu.edu writes:
    Does anyone know if an Interface Builder exists for the Mac II family
    similar to (or anything remotely close to) the Interface Builder on
    the NeXT machine?  I'm interested in either third party software or
    public domain software.  I'll take any hints available.

Scott Truesdell:
    I have used Prototyper from SmethersBarnes. It costs $189 from
    MacConnection, other mail orders houses have a similar price.  It lets
    you click and drag to build up an interface with menus, windows,
    dialogs, alerts, etc. Then you can have it spit out several flavors of
    Pascal or C code. The code is not optimized, but it runs and MAY serve
    as a starting place for a finished application.

I will be providing a full review of Prototyper in the upcoming Macker
journal. There is also a review in a fairly recent MacTutor, which is
almost coherent enough to tell what's going on.

Here's the highpoints:
Prototyper does what Scott T claims. It is fairly easy to use
(although the interface has little weirdnesses around the edges).

If you order it from MacConnection or from SmethersBarnes directly,
they give you a thirty-day MBG. SmethersBarnes's tech support was
excellent. They tried extra extra hard to find me answers.

The two big problems: Prototyper generates mildy ugly code, with
really quite stupid inline comments. It also is not optimized in the
worst ways. There are also a few out-and-out bugs that will require
you to fix their code, and a handful of shortcomings that are so
trivial to repair I wonder why they are in the manual rather than just
fixed. SmethersBarnes promised dozens of fixes in the next release,
but considering that this is supposed to be version 2.1, I really pity
anyone who bought version 1. Prototyper's code is hidden inside the
generator, so it would be extremely difficult to change it to suit
your whims.

I also looked briefly at AppMaker, another product of near identical
functionality. It seemed to generate even uglier code (generates a big
pile of if statements rather than a switch), but now I am forced to
wonder if its output code has fewer shortcomings and bugs. I know for
a fact that you can modify AppMaker's code (it's in resources as
text).

All in all, I am seriously thinking about returning Prototyper. It
seems to do a pretty darn good job of allowing you to "draw" your
resources on the screen and have them created -- much better than
ResEdit or whatever -- but the shortcomings of the code would indicate
that it would be simpler to generate one's own standard code to handle
things, and cut and paste as necessary.

And as a souped-up Resedit, Prototyper falls pretty short.

But more about this in the article.