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From: jwhitnell@cup.portal.com (Jerry D Whitnell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Prototyper opinions?
Message-ID: <14241@cup.portal.com>
Date: 2 Feb 89 21:21:13 GMT
References: <9128@burdvax.PRC.Unisys.COM>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 52

dave@emerald.PRC.Unisys.COM (David Lee Matuszek) writes...
|I am thinking about purchasing Prototyper, by SmetherBarnes.  Is this
|any good?  Is there something better?

I have Prototyper 1.0 and am a beta site for 2.0.  In general, it delivers
what it promises and is relativly bug free (at least the 1.0 is, I can't comment
on the quality of the beta 2.0).  There was a similar product annoucned at
MacWorld (at least I picked up a brochure for it), but I have not seen
the product itself.  I'd recommend to all beginning Mac programmers and any
non-beginners who either need to put together quick-and-dirty-but-Mac-pretty
applications or who like to play with the user interfaces of their programs
before casting them in concrete code.  As an example, I used it on a recent
contract that needed to be done quickly.  The buyers were even willing to
have a stdio interface if it would take less time, but with Prototyper I
was able to throw together a real Mac interface and generate code in 4 hours.

|Prototyper promises to let me build my interface in a Mac-like manner,
|then produce Pascal code I can use in my program.  Does it deliver?

In Prototyper, you basically draw your interface.  You have one window that
you specify your menus in (in 2.0 they can be heirarchical) by typing in
the titles of each menu and the items in the menu.  They give you default
Apple, File and Edit menus to start with, which you can edit.  You can also
have create any number of windows, which you can specify as normal windows,
dialogs or alerts.  You can then add to these windows, using a MacDraw-style
palette interface, buttons, check boxs, radio buttons, lists, lines, pictures,
static text and editable text.  You can link the buttons to open other windows
or dialogs and also link menu items to open and close windows.  Version
2.0 will also support pop-up menus and provides a more complete set of
commands for the links.

You can then "run" your interface to see what it looks like.  This is basically
a simple interpretor built into Prototyper that interprets your prototype.
The links tell the interpretor what to do when you select a menu item or click
on a button.  

Once you are satisfied with your interface, you can then generate the Pascal
code.  The source code includes the main loop, control routines for the dialog
boxes and alert boxs and code to handle the menus.  It also generates resources
in both RMaker and binary form.  The code generated is reasonably good and
requires little modification.  There are place-holders where you'll need to
add the code that does the real work, but these are commented so you can
find them.  The code is specific to your application so there is little
redundent code.  Version 2.0 will include C code generators as well as Pascal.

Version 2.0 is due out RSN.  I recommend, however, you buy 1.0 and upgrade
to 2.0 as 2.0 will have a major price increase attached to it.

--
Jerry Whitnell                    Several Species of Small Furry
jwhitnell@cup.portal.com          Animals Gathered Together in a
..!sun!cup.portal.com!jwhitnell   Cave and Grooving with a PICT.