FERGUSON@TMASL.EXXON.COM (06/15/89)
At the ADUS meeting in San Francisco, 1987, the Apollo user environment people indicated that they would continue to support Domain/Dialog for some time, but they would no longer enhance it. They were directing all efforts toward X-Windows, and Open Dialogue. I was pretty steamed, because I'm the kind of guy who doesn't really care about standards as much as I do performance, and X-Windows wasn't the 'performance' environment for Apollos. Anyway, I assumed that the life of Dialogue became finite on that day, and stopped using it. I almost spent the money to buy it here at my new job, but I backed off because of this attitude. I have loads of image processing and BLT-oriented programs written with GPR which would be fantastic if I could stick a snappy user interface on them, but I'm not buying a dead horse. I'm told that with the Apollo-supported X-11 and Open Dialogue, that you can run DM windows. I don't know whether you can use a DM window with Open Dialogue, however. Anyway, in my opinion, the only way to get user interfaces built in the DM is by building my own, because Dialogue is on its way out. I can't really switch to X, because of the lack of imaging performance in the graphics libraries (correct me if I'm wrong, someone). Our application has too many bitplanes, BLT's and write_pixels calls to warrant the use of X on Apollos. That makes me mad. Take a good product, go standards crazy, and scrap it. And who's to say Open Dialogue won't have the same future? HP seems really pleased with its own user interface technology, so why bother? Scott Ferguson Exxon Research & Engineering Annandale, NJ 08801 (201) 730-2339 ferguson@erevax.bitnet
lwk@CAEN.ENGIN.UMICH.EDU (Woody Kellum) (06/21/89)
In responding to Darryl Conliffe's message, I failed to specify that I was looking at Open Dialogue, not Domain/Dialog. - Woody Kellum