1j478@cahaba.med.unc.edu (Denise Moultrie) (11/30/89)
Has anyone out there done anything on GEM Paint
or GEM Desktop? A friend of mine is buying a system
and these two programs are offered *free* along with
a couple of other things. Also, have you heard
anything about a program called AlphaWorks?
Thanks
Denise Moultrie
1j478@uncmed.med.unc.edu
_______________________
Denise Moultrie *** 1j478@uncmed.uucp *** 1j478@med.unc.edu
--------****moultrie@uncvax1.bitnet****--------
6019 Patient Support Tower, North Carolina Memorial Hospital steve@thelake.UUCP (Steve Yelvington) (12/04/89)
1j478@cahaba.med.unc.edu (Denise Moultrie) writes ... > Has anyone out there done anything on GEM Paint > or GEM Desktop? A friend of mine is buying a system > and these two programs are offered *free* along with > a couple of other things. Also, have you heard > anything about a program called AlphaWorks? Sounds like your friend is getting an Amstrad or Apricot. I know nothing about AlphaWorks, but I can give you some background on GEM. GEM is a mouse-driven, point-and-click graphical environment from Digital Research Inc. It lets programmers build applications that are very Macintosh-like -- so much so that Apple sued DRI. The original version of GEM Desktop for the IBM-PC presented a user interface very much like the Apple Finder -- i.e., icons for disk drives and trash can, drop-down menus, desk accessories, and overlapping windows with icons for each program or data file. The post-lawsuit version of GEM Desktop is relatively crippled, but still more beginner-friendly than a "C:\>" prompt on a black screen. There are many GEM applications for the PC, of which GEM Paint is one. Ventura Publisher and the Timeworks desktop publishing program use the GEM interface. GEM also runs on the (Motorola 68000-based) Atari ST, which has hundreds of GEM applications at this point. Atari applications are occasionally ported to the PC; the Timeworks publisher and GEM First Word are examples. GEM is similar to Microsoft Windows, but GEM is simpler, smaller and faster. As a result, an application such as Ventura Publisher is tolerable on a PC-XT-class computer where Pagemaker under Windows would be too much to handle. -- Steve Yelvington, up at the lake in Minnesota ... pwcs.StPaul.GOV!stag!thelake!steve (UUCP)