taylor@hplabs.hp.com (Dave Taylor) (03/23/89)
I was quite interested to see the announcement from Sun Microsystems at
UniForum of their trio of SunWrite, SunDraw and SunPaint. Based on
technologies from Island Graphics (hi Dan!) the three appear to be an
attempt to position the Sun as a Mac replacement, as well as the
high-power Unix workstation that it is.
One thing I can't help thinking about, though, is that the third party
companies like Interleaf and Frame must be pretty unhappy with not only
the announcement of these products, but about the official McNealy stance
that Sun is going to continue to develop the package until they have a
"competitive publishing system". Where will that leave these third party
companies?
Also, has anyone actually used the three packages in question, and can
they compare them to the Macintosh products of the same name? I'm
especially interested in hearing them compared to the new generation of
MacWrite and MacDraw that have only recently been released by
Claris/Apple.
What do the rest of you SunSpot readers think? Do you think that the
packages are "the wave of the future" and a sure sign that Sun is
continuing their dominance in the workstation marketplace? Or is it an
early release of the so-called SPARCintosh group to get some revenue for
their imminent move to the new Menlo Park facilities? Or is it a sign
that Sun is muddying the waters and isn't really sure who their target
market is anymore? Or??
Thanks for the input: via email, please.
-- Dave Taylor
guest of HP Laboratories: taylor@hplabs.hp.com
NOTE: My views most certainly do not represent the views of Hewlett-
Packard, and quite possibly do not represent the views of anyone
else at all ...daveb@uunet.uu.net (David Collier-Brown) (04/21/89)
taylor@hplabs.hp.com (Dave Taylor): > I was quite interested to see the announcement from Sun Microsystems at > UniForum of their trio of SunWrite, SunDraw and SunPaint. > [...] > One thing I can't help thinking about, though, is that the third party > companies like Interleaf and Frame must be pretty unhappy I'm not sure what the company's official position is likely to be, but I will comment on the positioning of Interleaf and MacPaint... Interleaf has a standard filter for reading MacPaint documents into interleaf. One can often draw pictures better with picture-drawing tools than a typesetting package. Not unexpectedly, one can typeset better with a typesetting package. That one can draw reasonable things (line drawings, simple isometric "blueprints") with the package you use to typeset your 9-volume maintenance manual is a usefull bonus. --dave (horses for courses, you see) c-b DISCLAIMER: I work for Interleaf Canada. I do not speak for them. The president does that. -- David Collier-Brown. | yunexus!lethe!dave Interleaf Canada Inc. | 1550 Enterprise Rd. | He's so smart he's dumb. Mississauga, Ontario | --Joyce C-B
monty@delphi.bsd.uchicago.edu (Monty Mullig) (05/10/89)
well, we have the cute new sunwrite et. al. up now and it looks great. a bit slow on a 3/50, which is a shame since that would be a pretty logical machine to give to users who do a lot of word processing given its price these days. user reception has been very positive, which with user-oriented programs like this is very important. two complaints about the software, both well warranted. the first is that there appears to be no method of obtaining a directory listing from within the package (ouch), and that the print function doesn't seem to have an option for the number of copies to print 8-(. we could have missed something on those two, but we don't think so. one would hope for a speedy enhancement to fix these two shortcomings of an otherwise pretty surprisingly decent package. --monty mullig univ of chicago biological sciences division