don@CS.UMD.EDU (Don Hopkins) (03/15/90)
Hurray hurray!! GoodNeWS and HyperNeWS version 1.3, by Arthur van Hoff of the Turing Institute, are now available via anonymous ftp, from tumtum.cs.umd.edu (128.8.128.49). [Set binary mode, go to the "NeWS" directory, and retrieve the file "HyperNeWS1.3.RELEASE.tar.Z". A collection of lots of other NeWS programs is in the file "news-tape.tar.Z".] What is it? Well, as understated by the README file: "This is GoodNeWS/HyperNeWS for OpenWindows1.0. HyperNeWS provides a complete user-interface development environment, which is considerable easier to use than other offerings." Run, don't walk, to your nearest shell window, fire up an ftp, and get a copy! It's too good to describe in detail, but basically, GoodNeWS is a window system environment for NeWS, and HyperNeWS is HyperCard done *RIGHT*, with PostScript instead of pixels, and Unix instead of MacOS. GoodNeWS includes a wonderful color PostScript drawing editor (which can now include encapsulated PostScript documents!), utilities to include plots in GoodNeWS drawings and GoodNeWS drawings in LaTeX documents, a dvi previewer and dvi to PostScript converter (to print and view LaTeX documents), a terminal emulator, a load monitor, a chess position editor (you can paste chess boards into the drawing editor), and a scrabble game. You can make HyperNeWS stacks, in arbitrarily shaped windows, with graphics and buttons and other user interface objects that are programmable in PostScript. You can cut and paste drawings between the GoodNeWS drawing editor and HyperNeWS stacks (and there is a new drawing editor implemented on top of HyperNeWS!), make stacks with buttons, scroll bars, sliders, scrolling editable text windows, menus, dials, and more. You can write PostScript scripts for the user interface objects (stacks, backgrounds, cards, and other stuff), and there's even (very importantly) a client side library to HyperNeWS, so you can interface C, Prolog, and Lisp programs to HyperNeWS stacks! HyperNeWS is actually a complete toolkit, and you can create user interfaces using the drawing tool and HyperNeWS stack editing commands (menus, buttons, sliders, text windows, keyboard accelerators, etc). There are HyperNeWS stacks with documentation about GoodNeWS and HyperNeWS, a class browser stack, stacks for editing the characteristics of various HyperNeWS objects, and a lots of nifty demos. (Pete's neck never gets tired!) Best of all, it's free! Thanks to everybody at Turing for making it fly! -Don