dmg@ssc-vax.UUCP (David Geary) (08/02/88)
I will soon be writing a graphical interface to Unix for Sun
workstations. Recently I received NeWS, and have been playing with
it for about a week or so.
I'm trying to figure out whether or not NeWS is mature enough to
for such a project.
I'd like to know what bugs you have found with NeWS, and what
you like/dislike about it. Here's a summary of my impressions so
far:
Pros:
1) The postscript language, along with the object-oriented features
in NeWS give a very powerful development tool for implementing user
interfaces.
2) NeWS code, since it runs via an interpreter appears to be *easy*
to debug.
Cons:
1) The whole thing seems sluggish to me. I thought that SunView
window manipulation was slow compared to my Amiga, but NeWS seems
even worse than SunView. Right now, I'm running vi inside of a
VT102 emulator (psterm??), and I can outtype it at will.
2) If I run NeWS inside of SunView, by "setenv FRAMEBUFFER x y w h"
(BTW, thanks to all who replied to my previous posting on this), I
don't get a window, I just get a non-sizeable area of the screen
that I can only run NeWS in - yuck. If I run SunView application
inside of NeWS, I get an unsightly border around the SunView
application. I'd like to be able to just run a NeWS application
inside of SunView, in a window that looks and behaves just like a
SunView window.
Anybody else care to add to this discussion? NeWS seems *neat* to
me, but I'm unsure of it's maturity. (Actually, I'm unsure of my
maturity too).
Thanx.
--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~ David Geary, Boeing Aerospace, ~
~ Seattle - "THE DRIZZLE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD" ~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~pvo3366@neptune.uucp (Paul O'Neill) (08/03/88)
In article <2135@ssc-vax.UUCP> dmg@ssc-vax.UUCP (David Geary) writes: > >2) If I run NeWS inside of SunView, by "setenv FRAMEBUFFER x y w h" >(BTW, thanks to all who replied to my previous posting on this), I >don't get a window, I just get a non-sizeable area of the screen >that I can only run NeWS in - yuck. If I run SunView application..... This is a neat trick!! I couldn't find any postings describing this, so I assume people must have mailed it to you. Does it really work as quoted in your posting? It took me a long time to figure out setenv FRAMEBUFFER '/dev/fb x y w h' was what was required. Where is this documented? Wizards---why won't setenv FRAMEBUFFER /dev/win* work? Paul O'Neill pvo@oce.orst.edu Coastal Imaging Lab OSU/Oceanography Corvallis, OR 97331 503-754-3251
benoni@ssc-vax.UUCP (Charles L Ditzel) (08/03/88)
in article <2135@ssc-vax.UUCP>, dmg@ssc-vax.UUCP (David Geary) says: > I will soon be writing a graphical interface to Unix for Sun > workstations. Recently I received NeWS, and have been playing with > it for about a week or so. > I'm trying to figure out whether or not NeWS is mature enough to > for such a project. Why not ? Certainly others are writing NeWS-based applications...Sun itself recently released an IBM 3270 emulator that runs under NeWS. However, NeWS 1.1 remains an unsupported product and that may figure in your thinking...(for that matter X remains an unsupported product also..) Sun will release an X/NeWS merged product soon... (Silicon Graphics incidentally already has an X/NeWS window system which according to the net traffic works better with NeWS than X...:-) > that I can only run NeWS in - yuck. If I run SunView application > inside of NeWS, I get an unsightly border around the SunView > application. I'd like to be able to just run a NeWS application > inside of SunView, in a window that looks and behaves just like a > SunView window. It sounds like you are anticipating 4.1 when NeWS, X and Sunview windows will cohabitate the screen peacefully...for the moment you'll have to live with the white edging on your Sunview windows I generally have some of the same gripes about type-ahead that you have however i realize that 1) the product is unsupported and 2) provides me with an initial development environment while i wait for the supported NeWS/X window system. ----------------------------------------------------- My opinions are obviously my own and not my employers...
hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) (08/03/88)
In response to the question as to whether NeWS is UsEAbLE, I think the answer is a qualified yes. It got a bad reputation for crashing under 1.0. There are no doubt still ways to make 1.1 crash, but I haven't ever seen it crash, and I don't think our users find that a problem anymore. The tendency around here is to do any new applications for it, as it seems to be easier to program than other windows systems. The main problem is that there aren't many normal system applications for it. X has versions of most of the standard Sunview tools. NeWS does not. However Sunview applications run under NeWS, though in a slightly clunky way, so that isn't as bad a problem as it might be. The biggest problem, as everyone agrees, is that there's no decent terminal emulator. If the one that is going to be posted Real Soon Now solves that problem, I think NeWS will be ready for serious use by real users. I'm still not convinced that there's any generic performance problem with NeWS itself. Nterm is certainly unacceptably slow, but I don't find psterm to be. I'm sure that like many other things it will depend upon the application, and also on how it is structured. However having said that, I'm still beginning to wonder whether NeWS isn't sort of an orphan. I kept hoping that Sun would be coming up with a basic set of NeWS applications. But the presentation at Usenix said that they were doing Sunview 2 in X, and the final NeWS development system wouldn't be out until sometime in 89. NeWS 1.1 doesn't have any more applications than 1.0. It's clear that like computer systems, languages, etc., a window system is going to win based on the software that is available for it, not its theoretical merit. If Sun themselves aren't willing to start producing applications for it, I think it's bound to end up as sort of a backwater (a very nice backwater, understand). I'm not worried that NeWS will vanish. Merged X/NeWS will at least make sure that the final Sun window system has the capability to run NeWS. So I don't feel badly about doing applications based on it. But it's beginning to look like the "software gap" is becoming impossible. The X community already has a long head start, and if Sun is depending upon System V release 4 to get NeWS out, that's going to hold things up long enough that I just can't see it catching up. I suspect we'll still use NeWS for things that we don't mind seeing run only on the Sun. But I'm beginning to think that where we have to choose a window system, it's likely to be X. There are several contexts in which we really do have to choose one window system, and can't depend upon merged X/NeWS. I'd like to use micros as window servers, and I also like the looks of the new Visual Technology X terminal. I think it may be asking a bit much for these low-end products to run merged X/NeWS. Oddly enough, my feeling that we should be using X will take effect only when we get the merged X/NeWS. For the moment, I'm inclined to recommend that people use NeWS. I think our users would react very badly to the rather hacker-oriented style of the X tools. So I think our large-scale X use is likely to start with Sunview 2/Open Look. For the moment, we have both, but I'm suggesting that people continue using the Sunview tools under NeWS and do their own development work in NeWS. When vendors ask us which window system we'd like them to support, I just don't know what to tell them. If anybody at Sun wants to change this, I advise them to get a usable terminal emulator out immediately, and within the next few months come up with NeWS versions of the major Sunview tools. But I think we'd know already if such an effort were underway.
earle@MAHENDO.JPL.NASA.GOV (Greg Earle) (08/11/88)
>2) If I run NeWS inside of SunView, by "setenv FRAMEBUFFER x y w h" >(BTW, thanks to all who replied to my previous posting on this), I >don't get a window, I just get a non-sizeable area of the screen >that I can only run NeWS in - yuck. If I run SunView application >inside of NeWS, I get an unsightly border around the SunView >application. I'd like to be able to just run a NeWS application >inside of SunView, in a window that looks and behaves just like a >SunView window. It may be `yuck', but that's what you get. If you don't like it, run NeWS (to take over the entire framebuffer) from inside SunView using overview(1). You seem to want to consider NeWS a window-able application of SunView, and it just isn't. It's on the same level as SunView, and must be looked at that way. You get an unsightly border around SunView applications because this is done on purpose to prevent strange mouse droppings from occurring when one goes from a SunView window frame borderinto a NeWS window or NeWS root window. You're lucky that you can even run SunView binaries inside of NeWS; you can't go the other way! You'd like to be able to run NeWS applications under SunView, but (right now) this is not possible. When SunView 2 is released (as a toolkit for X11/NeWS), you'll be able to do so, because by then SunView will be a subset of X11/NeWS and everything will be one big, happy family. Until then, sorry ... - Greg Earle Sun Los Angeles Consulting
bzs@encore.UUCP (Barry Shein) (08/21/88)
(I swear I am trying to remain open-minded, don't confuse hard questions with strong opinions.) Does there exist any graphics editor which can take a postscript image description and let you edit it visually in some useful way? Is this hard? I think it's possible, but my intuitions say it's very hard, not sure why exactly other than that such editors tend to want object descriptions and postscript doesn't particularly lend itself to that (it could be enforced as a discipline of course, I mean that given some random graphic image from someone it won't likely be structured in any particularly useful way.) So such programs have to define some other file format, typically their own (I guess QuickDraw was designed with this in mind?), which can later be translated to postscript if desired. This tends to deny the idea that ps is an image transmission/storage language. If I store an interesting image in ps I'm not sure I can later edit it (say a bunch of clip-art I might want to touch up for layout later, I suppose anything is possible by simply overlaying with new opaque elements, but the real issue is being able to do something like point to an area and say "fill it w/ gray 80%" or change the light source.) What would it have taken to have made postscript also appropropriate for graphical editing? Not sure. This is just a bunch of questions. -Barry Shein, ||Encore||
asente@decwrl.dec.com (Paul Asente) (08/23/88)
In article <3499@encore.UUCP> bzs@encore.UUCP (Barry Shein) writes: >Does there exist any graphics editor which can take a postscript image >description and let you edit it visually in some useful way? > >Is this hard? I think it's possible, but my intuitions say it's very >hard, not sure why exactly other than that such editors tend to want >object descriptions and postscript doesn't particularly lend itself to >that (it could be enforced as a discipline of course, I mean that >given some random graphic image from someone it won't likely be >structured in any particularly useful way.) >... >What would it have taken to have made postscript also appropropriate >for graphical editing? Not sure. This is just a bunch of questions. Funny you should ask this question. I spent the last few years of my life doing a thesis on this very subject. You are right; it's very hard. My solution was to design a new language that was very close to PostScript but had the idea of objects. It would be possible to imbed this in PostScript by defining new operators, but it was still a new language. There are reasons that you don't want to do this by imbedding -- PostScript is so flexible that it's impossible to statically analyze a program and deduce anything interesting about it. In order to make editing fast you have to do some reasoning about the program, so I gave up some of PostScript's flexibility. PostScript programs that are "well behaved" can mechanically be translated into my language, but others cannot. If you want all the details, you can order report 87/6 from DEC WRL: Carmen Rouse DEC Western Research Laboratory 100 Hamilton Avenue Palo Alto, CA 94301 -paul asente asente@decwrl.dec.com decwrl!asente
jefu@pawl13.pawl.rpi.edu (Jeffrey Putnam) (08/25/88)
In article <229.8808111329@jura.ritd.co.uk> mr@ritd.co.UK writes: >I'd like to endorse the item from Charles Hedrick <hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu> >*especially* the comment about the window of opportunity for NeWS closing >rapidly. I really hope that Sun responds to this message (but don't hold >out much hope :-(). Me too. But I would like to add that I think that the window has essentially closed. Too bad. I think that NeWS was a great system but that unavailability of (even buggy) releases and especially code has just about killed all but parochial interest in NeWS as it has made the kind of ubiquitous hacking and production of tools and toys difficult for many people - and in the Unix (tm - and all standard hand waving) world that is one of the things that sells systems. jeff putnam jefu@pawl.rpi.edu "It is easier to get forgiveness than permission."