RE: DOES ANYONE OWN SYNTAX? (APPARENTLY, APPLE DOESN'T THINK SO EITHER!)
RE: DOES ANYONE OWN SYNTAX? (APPARENTLY, APPLE DOESN'T THINK SO EITHER!)
Sent: 12/6/96; 1:34:27 PM
From: Roepcke_Jim/SCAN4@shell.ca
Dave, I want to thank you for your latest DaveNet essay "Does Anyone Own Syntax"! (And for that matter, all the previous ones I've read too...)
While I agree with you 100% that it is in the interest of consumers to be able to buy competing products that emulate and extend other's languages, I can sympathize with the company who's cash cow is being slaughtered to feed the world :-)
Of course, I'd still rather see a competitive marketplace, so my sympathy is limited in that respect ;-)
A good example of this is ObjectPlus Corporation's "WinPlus" software. WinPlus 3.06 is a 99.999% clone of HYPERCARD 2.2!!! I know it's that close because I've spent over a year and a half converting over 700MB of HyperCard stacks (about 6500 stacks) to the WinPlus environment (successfully). They implement HyperTalk in it's entirety, but call it "PPL" (Plus Programming Language) and add a lot of GREAT extensions...
This products is a spinoff of the spinoff of Spinnaker's old "Plus" product that existed for Mac's and DOS.
Apple (to my knowledge, and I know the developers well enough I would have heard about it) has not sued ObjectPlus over HyperTalk or the shameless copy of HyperCard.
I wonder what Apple would say if you asked them "Why not?"
Thanks again for something to make me say "Hmmmmm"....
PS: I use Frontier 4.1 a lot, and would love to suggest it to all my associates, especially other contractors that I sometimes team up with to make websites for companies. Unfortunately, some of them have just recently bought shiny new PCs... (I'm a big PC user as well as a Mac user BTW, I use OS/2 Warp mainly, but also Win95 (which is not bad) and WinNT 4.0 (YUCK! Crippleware city!)) I wish I had known about Frontier when I had suggested Macs to these people. They challenged my preference for Macs for website publishing, and while I did enough to reconvince myself to use Macs ;-), I feel I could have won over a couple people if I had shown them Frontier.
To make a long story a bit shorter, I'm glad you're making Frontier for Windows. I don't know how well it will work since the Windows world doesn't have the equivalent of "AppleEvents Everywhere" mentality like all decent Mac software does, but I'm curious to see what will happen. If anything, it will let me collaborate with fellow (PC) Web Designers in a way that I think would be mutually beneficial.
PS: If you create Frontier for Windows in mainly Win32 code, it would be EASILY portable to OS/2 Warp! (since IBM's "Open32" libraries implement 800 Win32 API's and 300 Win32 messages natively in OS/2) OS/2 would be a great platform for Frontier, since it supports OSA scripting languages (currently ObjectREXX) at the shell level (the Workplace Shell). (and also OpenDoc for example) Also, Warp is a great Webserver platform, whereas NT 4.0 obviously is not since MS crippled its license, and Win95 just doesn't cut it.
There is a popular web server called GoServ that is an HTTP and Gopher server completely implemented in REXX! People enhance and share code snippets for GoServe in much the same way Frontier users share things (there's a GoServ mailing list for example, but no equivalent to the LTODBS, since GoServ has no ODB :-))
(Sorry, I don't have an URL for GoServ here at work! It's IBM EWS (Employee Written Software). I think it's written by Mike Colishaw, the inventor of the REXX lanuage)
Anyway, there's my 2 cents. Thanks for reading this message, and I'd love to hear what you think about the WinPlus situation, and even the feasability of Frontier for OS/2 if you wouldn't mind... ttyl,
Jim Roepcke Roepcke Computing Solutions jroepcke@compusmart.ab.ca (403) 467-5245
|
This page was last built on Sat, Dec 14, 1996 at 8:15:45 AM. The messages in this site are responses to DaveNet essays. |