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!