Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!oliveb!sun!gorodish!guy From: guy@gorodish.Sun.COM (Guy Harris) Newsgroups: comp.windows.news Subject: Re: Press Release-AT&T Look & Feel Message-ID: <49481@sun.uucp> Date: 14 Apr 88 05:38:36 GMT References: <8804122102.AA23385@brillig.umd.edu> <1043@daisy.UUCP> Sender: news@sun.uucp Lines: 60 > I agree. X and NeWS are primarily function libraries, much as stdio > and curses are for dumb tty's. Open Look seems more like a command > interpreter, i.e., a graphical shell. Well, sort of. Ultimately, it's a set of user-interface guidelines. Various pieces of software will implement a user interface adhering to these guidelines. I suspect these would include: an X11 window manager, which would in some ways be part of a graphical shell (i.e., you could pop up a menu listing the applications you could launch); NeWS PostScript code to manage the root NeWS window, which would be part of a graphical shell in the same way the aforementioned X11 window manager would. It would also include toolkits to be used to write applications that adhere to these guidelines. > In fact, I would be suprised of Open Look were not implemented on X, NeWS, > or Sun's announced merged product. A videotape of the AT&T/Sun/Xerox/Lotus/Ashton-Tate press conference was shown at a Sun Software Products Division meeting today. Among other things, it was stated that AT&T would be implementing Open Look atop Xt (I assume this would be a procedural interface implemented atop Xt) and making it available on their 386 box (along with X11) sometime late this year. It was also stated that Sun would be providing an implementation atop the NeWS Development Environment (a NeWS toolkit under development) late this year as well; I don't know whether this would come out with a future NeWS release, but I presume this is the intent. > The problem they will have is maintaining the power of UNIX with a > graphical command language. Although easier to use, I think the > Macintosh command interpreter is much less powerful than csh or ksh. Well, I suspect that at least one application implemented using the Open Look guidelines and one of the Open Look toolkits would be a "terminal emulator" - i.e., the moral equivalent of "shelltool", "xterm", "nterm", etc.. For certain users, this may very well be the proper way of providing a "command interface". Another "command language" that might be implemented could be a version of the Sun Organizer(TM, sigh) announced with the Sun-386i machine; it shows a list of icons for files in a given directory, with the name of the file next to its icon, and permits you to click on the icons to e.g. edit a text file. (In order to be generally useful, this would have to be customizable through a file, such as the NBI/ISI window manager or DonZ is. I don't know whether the Sun Organizer is or not.) Somebody could, conceivably, come up with an interface that is sufficiently powerful that it could replace a conventional command language interface in many cases. They could provide an Open Look-style implementation of this, providing yet another "command language". In other words, I don't know that there will be a single "command language" for Open Look. Although many aspects of the user interface of (well-designed) Mac applications are the same, the "command language" for a spreadsheet is likely to be different from the "command language" for a mechanical CAD program, simply because they manipulate different objects; I don't think there's likely to be a "recalculate" command in the CAD program, or at least not one that means the exact same thing as the "recalculate" program in the spreadsheet.