dick@lhs.woodside.ca.us (dick benster) (04/23/91)
BANG 17-Apr-91 Meeting Review (San Francisco Bay Area NeXT Group) Dick Benster - La Honda Software April's meeting began with the following announcements: 1) Boss Logic is looking for a couple of software engineers (the Company number is 414-472-7740 in Fairfield Iowa) 2) Pages Corp of San Diego is looking for one software engineer (619) 492-9050 bwebster@pages.com 3) Software Ventures is looking for Beta testers of its MicroPhone 2 communications software (415-644-3232) - they want only parties with communications expertise and specific purposes! 4) Agog is looking for Beta testers for its Squeeze data compression software (agog!squeeze@next.com) 5) Please note that the NeXT developer SIG will be held Tuesday 23-Apr-91 at NeXT (600 Galviston in Redwood City). Avi Tevanian, head of the Mach group, will be speaking on Mach. 7) Steve Scharbach of Computer Attic announced that Computer Attic and NeXT will be exhibiting both NeXT and third-party software and hardware at a special exhibit May 1, 1991 from 8:30am - 1pm at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Steven Jobs will be giving the keynote address. The emphasis will be on existing and emerging NeXT-based software/hardware solutions to your computing needs - there will *LOTS* of products being demo'ed. You *MUST* RSVP to attend. Call Computer Attic at 415-322-4800x66 for more details and to RSVP. This looks very promising, and seems to be a terrific opportunity to see in a half-day show what's happening in the NeXT commercial world. 8) A new NeXT users group has started in San Francisco, called FOGNUG. Please email <FogNUG-request@sutro.sfsu.edu> for more information. After a few questions, we went into the evenings presentations. Arthur Kyle speaks of Canon and NeXT in Asia Arthur Kyle of Canon, Inc. spoke first about his experiences of working in Tokyo as a an employee of Canon working as a third-party liaison, primarily with NeXT. Arthur gave some background information, pointing out that Canon owns 16.67% of NeXT, which it purchased for $100 million. When Arthur first heard that Canon would sell NeXT in Asia, he viewed it as the "kiss of death" for NeXT, as Canon sells 60% - 70% of all Macs in Japan, and thought that this would block NeXT's success. This has not turned out to be true, and Arthur has turned into a "true believer" in both the NeXT machines as well as the NeXT/Canon relationship. The Canon name we hear really represents two distinct companies: Canon, Inc. is more the scientific and engineering side, producing cameras, photocopiers, optical disks, etc, as well as selling the NeXT machines; Canon Sales is more the sales and distribution arm, including the Mac computers as well as the NeXT machines in smaller volumes. Canon Inc. is currently selling NeXT in about 10 Asian countries (Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, etc) with about 1,000 older cubes in place, and about 1,280 '040 processors placed in the first quarter (an unknown amount of these were '030 - '040 upgrades). The main purchasers are universities and research centers, with software developers also being significant customers. Steve Jobs is a folk hero in the Japanese computer industry given his success at Apple, which was important in his developing a strong partnership with Canon. In Arthur's opinion, NeXT has an excellent chance to really succeed in Asia when Kanji is finally fully supported - NeXTstep 2.1J is currently in beta, and supports mail, edit, IB and ".rtfj" (for Japanese) files. Each character requires two bytes. Programming in Kanji cleanly requires use of the text objects, with the English shared libraries replaced by Kanji ones. The basic programming model is for developers to keep strings separate, and to have English translated into Kanji where needed, keeping separate English/Kanji string modules. Canon is very serious about its partnership with NeXT, and has committed outstanding in-house talent to the partnership, and provided expertise in the software necessary for the Kanji/multi-lingual support. Additionally, Canon provides NeXT with a sales, distribution, and technical support capability throughout Asia that would be otherwise beyond NeXT's limited resources to achieve. Randy Nelson Waxes Philosophical Upon Aspects of NeXT Development To Randy Nelson, head of Developer Training for NeXT, the company's evolution can be split into pre- and post-Improv worlds. Improv represents a true milestone, now just being realized, in that it represents a new potential for users to customize a shrink-wrapped application, and to in turn connect it to other programs. Lotus is just now releasing its API which will allow developers and sophisticated users to tap into the underlying technology of Improv. Lotus itself worked on the interface of Improv until very late in the product development cycle - the plastic nature of the interface allows for many ways to access and utilize the core algorithms - future users will be able to develop there own interfaces layered on top of or horizontally to what currently exists. Randy also sees enormous potential and opportunities in the building of quality objects. Rather than building huge programs that do enormous amounts of things adequately, and a central task very well, he sees the future lying in "building one high quality brick, rather than a thin wall," and in "making great tools, not panaceas." An example of this that will hopefully come from NeXT itself is DBkit, which is a set of objects to access SQL data bases. His background is an unusual one, having come from a Fine Arts (painting) education into the world of computing, and an excellent one from which to perceive the emerging need in programming for changing from ground-up approaches to "providing linkages between great-working things." Randy is insistent that we must focus on providing quality tools and interfaces that other people can leverage off of to create other tools. NeXT IB, palettes, speaker/listener, and standard objects are the underlying technologies that NeXT provides to realize this. On the developer's training front, Randy stated complete agreement that a "developer-camp-on-a-disk" would be highly desirable, but also stated that there is no current commitment to do so. Also, for those contemplating development on the NeXT machines, or new to it, Randy highly recommends getting a copy of "The NeXTstep Advantage" from NeXT, which shows the development of a plotting application and is very informative about creating software on NeXT computers. Randy was very receptive to feed-back from BANG, and promised to take back two requests to NEXT for further consideration: 1) developers need access to more NeXT training materials, so that they can do in-house training of their colleagues to share what has been learned at developers camp; 2) everyone developing wants self-paced courses! Randy also announced that the 2.0 documentation is complete (including the Concepts manual!), and being printed. Distribution is now the key issue - hang on! Lee Boynton Speaks on the Workspace Manager Request the "Info Panel" on your Workspace Manager (WSM), and "Lee Boynton" greets you as one of the authors of this excellent application. Lee gave a high-speed overview of the app (he was squeezed for time due to a fire-alarm that cut 15 minutes of content from our meeting). Here are some highlights of what he covered: * you can change the icons for a directory easily. There are two icons - one for the standard directory display, and one for the "open" directory (one that is having a file moved, copied, or linked to it). To change the standard icon, place your tiff icon into a file called ".dir.tiff" To change the open icon, place your tiff icon into a file called ".opendir.tiff" * The Workspace inspector (invoked via the tools menu) is new and uses multi-tasking. For instance, under the Attributes Inspector you have the "Compute" button. This fires up a separate task to compute the disk usage of the specified directory. * The inspector is actually extensible - NeXT needs to release the API for this. No word on when this might happen. * The WSM was rewritten to "dekernalize" it, so its now more modular and multi-tasked - before it was one giant program. Specifically, the WSM starts up a File Mover, a File Sizer,a Finder, or a Disk Mounter as directed by user requests. * You can now use a Find panel to find a program and launch it via double-click on the file name in the panel. * The Process panel allows you to inspect either background or application programs. Again, you choose by double-clicking. Copy/move are examples of background processes. * A key problem the WSM group had to deal with in development was the asynchronous nature of giving the results of a completing parallel task (say File Mover). Error messages presented similar problems: how do you notify the user, who may be making a cursor-driven selection, about something when the notice might inadvertently change the selection? For instance, you would not want the WSM to insert a new file name into a file list during a copy right as you were double-clicking another file name. Here the solution was to not allow updates while the cursor was in the window with the file list, so that the list is not updated until the cursor leaves the window (so as a consequence, if you want faster feed-back, move the cursor from the window during WSM copies and moves!). *) Here is a typical multi-tasked transaction history by the WSM in copying a file: create new process WSM ==================> File Mover reply to launch <================== start copying ===================> update pie chart (on background panel) <=================== update pie chart (on background panel) <=================== . . . copy complete <=================== *) Lee's conclusions regarding dealing with asynchronous processes are 1) provide immediate feedback to the user when possible 2) avoid moving controlling pixels asynchronously 3) don't make the user wait for something to complete before other requests can be made *) If you want to make a link to a file (versus copy or move), control-drag it to the desired directory. Dan Lavin Clarifies Changes at NEXTWORLD Dan Lavin, NEXTWORLD's Technical Editor, briefly outlined changes that have occurred at the magazine: *) Former Editor in Chief Michael Miley is writing a book, and has been replaced by Dan Ruby, previously with MacWeek and InfoWorld. *) The magazine will now be published on a quarterly basis, every 3 months instead of every two months. Dan is hopeful (not certain!) that current subscribers will still receive a total of 6 issues of the magazine for their subscription, since that what a year's subscription meant when they subscribed. *) Subscribers will additionally receive monthly newsletter (which will not include advertising) so hotter news will reach subscribers more quickly - the newsletter will be publish even during the months the magazine is published. NEXTWORLD believes this format will better serve the existing NeXT community given its current size. *) Simpson Garfinkel of MIT Media Lab fame is joining NEXTWORLD to add to the magazine's already considerable technical depth. *) Please contact NEXTWORLD if you have useful information regarding NeXT/NeXT community, which, besides obvious kinds of topics, includes: 1) fun mystery photos 2) actual code names used during the development of NeXT (and 3rd party) products 3) new shrink-wrapped software announcements 4) rumors! Please contact Dan at: dlavin@nextworld.com or 415-922-NEXT Join us at our next BANG meeting Please come to our next meeting (meetings are always the third Wednesday of every month and begin at 7pm): 15-May-91 at 7pm Stanford University Termin Auditorium Please watch email for announcement of the program. Cheers!