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From: don@CS.UMD.EDU (Don Hopkins)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news
Subject: Is SUN a "PURE PLAYER" in window systems - SunView or OpenWindows???
Message-ID: <9001042053.AA10511@brillig.UMD.EDU>
Date: 4 Jan 90 21:17:18 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 76


   Date: Thu, 4 Jan 90 14:39:38 -0500
   From: Peter W. Brewer <lerici@super.org>

   I'm not sure that X is so fixed in concrete that some of the things
   you find bothersome could not change. I find InterViews almost
   equivalent to PostScript in terms of 'imaging power' and yet
   flexible enough to do low level stuff..  and there is no
   interpreter nor the restrictions of a 'page description' paradigm.

I haven't used InterViews, so I'm not familiar with its imaging model
and flexability. I don't know what you mean by "page description'
paradigm, would you please explain? Does it have anything to do with
device independance, printer compatibility, etc? 

I see having an interpreter as an advantage! I think WINTERP is an
excellent idea, and I'd love to have a version of WINTERP with an
interface to the NeWS toolkit.  Extensibility is as useful on the
client side as it is on the server side!  What NeWS really needs
is a way to dynamically link object files containing compiled
primatives into the server at run time. (There was an *extremely*
undocumented primative for just that purpose called "dynoload" in
a beta version of NeWS 1.1 once, but I haven't seen it since. It's
certainly possible, just not portable. [I guess we should just
wait for PCR...])

   I like the look and feel of Motif more than OpenLook as a 'style guide', but
   I think in terms of functionality InterViews has them beat.. particularly
   with their new Unidraw graphical object/'widget' editor.

   I have yet to see anything like this come from NeWS. I see NeXT with 
   their NeXTStep and Display Postscript as being a more serious challenge to
   X and all other window systems than NeWS.

   Peter Brewer             ||||     |||||  |||||||||  ||||||  //|||||\  ||||||
   lerici@super.org	 ||       ||__   ||     ||    ||   ||           ||
   THE Supercomputing       ||       ||     ||^^^^^^\\   ||   ||           ||
   Research Center ~~~      |||||||| |||||  ||       || |||||  \\|||||/  ||||||

Have you tried GoodNeWS, by Arthur van Hoff of Turing Institute?
It's a window system built on top of NeWS, that includes a very
nice PostScript drawing editor (and lots of other useful stuff
like a LaTeX previewer that lets you place your GoodNeWS drawings
in your documents.) *AND IT'S ALL FREE!!!* (available via
anonymous ftp from tumtum.cs.umd.edu)

Agreed, NeXTStep and Display PostScript are serious challenges
to a lot of people, places, and things. (It doesn't hurt having
H. Ross Perot fighting for your cause.) IMOH, it remains to be
seen how flexable and easy to use the NeXTStep window system is.
I had a wonderful argument with Jobs at EduCom about it, and he
claimed they had tried all kinds of different user interface
techniques and done all sorts of usability studies that showed
that NeXTStep was incredibly easy to use. I'd like it if they'd
publish those usability studies, and included the source to the
window system in case I didn't agree with them, since I still
haven't figured out a way to interact with a window that's
partially covered up by another window, or how to type into a
window without clicking on it and bringing it to the top.
Enforced click-to-type is a throwback to the MacIntosh. Make it
an option or make it so I can fix the problem!

The interface builder looks very nice, but I don't know the
merits of the toolkit it's built on top of. Ohio State did a
study showing the interface builder was indeed easy to use. But
how easy is it to write an application such that you can build
an interface to it? And how easy is it to modify and implement
new parts of the toolkit and integrate them with pre-existing
applications? I talked with one of the NeXT window techies about
implenting pie menus on NeXTStep, gave him some papers on the
subject, and encouraged him to do it. I will be impressed if
somebody can implement pie menus in NeXTStep (with or without
the round windows) as seamlessly as they dropped into NeWS (so
every application gets pie menus, without modification). 

	-Don