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From: zerkle@iris.ucdavis.edu (Dan Zerkle)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: NeXT & Interface Builders
Message-ID: <7830@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu>
Date: 16 Oct 90 00:12:35 GMT
References: <33198@nigel.ee.udel.edu> <6803@sugar.hackercorp.com> <90288.143142UH2@psuvm.psu.edu>
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Reply-To: zerkle@iris.ucdavis.edu (Dan Zerkle)
Organization: U.C. Davis - Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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In article <90288.143142UH2@psuvm.psu.edu> UH2@psuvm.psu.edu (Lee Sailer) writes:
>On the topic of NeXT's Interface Builder...A friend of mine, a high
>priced lawyer in a computer illiterate law firm has been shopping for
>...
>Anyway, he went to Businessland in Pittsburgh, and they set up an
>appointment for him with NeXT, who gave him a pretty impressibe demo.
>
>The surprising thing, I thought, was the thing about NeXT that IMPRESSED
>HIM THE MOST.  Interface Builder.  I think he thinks he can use it to
>build custom applications.
>
>I think this is relevant because there seems to be growing sentiment
>from many sources that IB is something special.  I wish Amiga had something
>similar.

The IB *IS* something special.  From a programmer's standpoint (mine),
it is wonderful because it lets you tremendously cut down on the amount
of programming you need to do on the user interface of some graphical
application.  Let's face it--most of the programming and code for
typical applications is on the user interface, and that doesn't even do
anything that the program is supposed to accomplish!

On the other hand, your friend will probably NOT be able to program
anything with it.  To write anything other than the user interface, you
need to be conversant with C.  What's more, you need to know the little
additions and quirks of Objective C.  For people who are already
programmers, this is no big deal, but for a lay (or law) person, this
could be quite a project.

I, too, wish there was something like it for the Amiga.  I just spent
three days mucking around with the RKMs trying to figure out how to set
up colors, screens, windows, text, and lines on the Amiga, and I'm
doing something primitive.  I can't begin to thing what it would be
like to program a whole requester!  The IB gets you away from all of
that.  A moderately sophisticated interface would probably take all of
1/2 hour for someone with a small amount of experience to code from
scratch on a NeXT.  Of course, it could take a lot longer than that to
program something that actually DOES anything, but at least your aren't
spending all your time on the user interface.  On any other computer,
programming a flexible user interface is a royal pain in the neck!

Hey, that gives me an idea....  I wonder if I could write something
like this for the Amiga????  I'll bet a lot of programmers would
gleefully lay out money for a good package!

             Dan Zerkle  zerkle@iris.ucdavis.edu  (916) 754-0240
           Amiga...  Because life is too short for boring computers.