\begindata{text,7617152} \textdsversion{12} \template{default} \chapter{ Progress Report on the Andrew User Interface System} \leftindent{Wilfred J. Hansen Director, Andrew Consortium Carnegie Mellon University} \indent{\italic{This note reviews our work of 1992-1993 and describes the decisions at the 1993 Annual Meeting as to the work for the upcoming year. }} It has been a productive year for the consortium. Several new editors have been added, a user's guide produced, and much of the system converted to C++. A few extracts from The Andrew View will help describe the work. \heading{Volume 1, number 4, December 1992:} In December, 1993, the X Consortium will release the R6 version of X. As part of the X distribution, we release version Andrew version 6.0.x (for a small value of x). Release 6.0.x will be the same as 5.2.x; that is, it will be version 5.2.0 with a few patches to correct core dumps and other egregious errors. At that time, the permissions statement on the sources will be changed to the normal X permissions, allowing general exploitation of the code. Throughout the year, we will continue to enhance Andrew and release improvements to members. Patch releases correcting errors in 5.2.0 will be called 5.2.1, 5.2.2, and so on. However, releases to members with major enhancements will be labelled 6.1.0 and higher. These enhancements will not be included in the 6.0.x released to the X distribution. The full set of changes is described in a document entitled "Andrew User Interface System: New and Revised Features in Version 5.2.0." Here are the highlights. \bold{Launchapp} - Displays a menu of AUIS applications and serves as an alternative to the shell for initiating applications. Give the command `launchapp`; there is no help file; just click on the buttons. (Here at the School of Computer Science, the commands `atk` and `auis` also run launchapp. Sites can choose their own aliases.) \bold{Prefed} - An editor for the preferences file. It displays existing preferences and offers graphical options to change them; help is available on each preference. For help on the entire application, give the command `help prefed`. \bold{Figure} - Drawing editor; faster and more reliable than zip, though it lacks zip's capability for multiple levels of detail. `help figure` \bold{Image} - Supplements the existing raster inset by providing for multibit pixels and thus color and grey-scale images. Unlike raster, however, editing operations are not supported. A variety of image storage formats are supported such as jpeg, and gif. `help image` \bold{Keyboard-macro-to-ness-macro conversion} - With this facility users can define new key stroke and menu operations dynamically. Macros are created with the usual keyboard macro \{ ^X-( ... ^X-) \} and then converted to Ness, after which they can be edited as Ness code. `help macros` \bold{The ATK copyright} notice and disclaimer are now displayed in various key files such as the top level Imakefile and the README. It is displayed on starting up programs that use frame. \bold{Class hierarchy browsing} - A graphical representation of the class hierarchy can be created and viewed. The system installation process installs a tree of the standard Andrew classes into $ANDREWDIR/doc/atk/classes.org. You can create trees for other class hierarchies: `help mkbrowse` \bold{Click boxes in help} - All .help files have been converted to use the new 'Help Topic' font for references. They will appear surrounded with dotted boxes and can be simply clicked on to traverse to the referenced text. \bold{Raster editing} - When editing a raster you can now select the "Toolset" menu item; a separate window will appear with a menu of raster operations. In addition, there is an option in the main raster menu to overlay an arbitrary inset, such as text, on top of a raster. After editing the overlay to a desired image, its bits can be "frozen" to become part of the raster image. Thereafter, they can be edited just like any other part of the raster. \bold{Srctext} - Andrew has always had a diverse collection of tools for editing files particular formats: ctext for C code, mtext for Modula code, and so on. These have now been superseded with a more generalized mechanism provided by IBM Rochester. The superclass "srctext" provides general source text editing mechanisms which are supplemented by subclasses to provide editors for even more source languages than before. General help is available via `help srctext`. Languages supported include: assembly language, C++, C, Modula-3, Modula-2, and raw ATK data stream. \bold{Bdffont} - Numerous bug fixes and cleaning up. The font editor now works on all bdf format fonts we have been able to find. \bold{MIME format} - MIME support has been augmented. There is now better support for message bodies of type multipart/digest. And message bodies may contain items of type image/gif, image/pbm, image/ppm, image/pgm, and image/jpeg. There was a bug in the delivery system that kept MIME messages from netnews; this has been fixed. MIME documentation has been added to `help messages` \bold{Ness} - Version 1.7 has the functions ReadRawFile, WriteRawFile, QueueAnswer, QueueCancellation, WriteObject, and a collection of functions which emulate REXX functions. \bold{Parsing} - A new set of tools has been introduced for token analysis and parsing. They are in the source tree as the atk/syntax subtree. Facilities include a version of the bison parser (from the Free Software Foundation), a parse object which uses tables generated by bison, a symbol table, a lexeme scanner and an associated lexeme description processor. These new tools are objects in the Andrew sense so it is easy to incorporate multiple instances in a single application. Moreover, many lexemes are understood from the bison grammar and need not be described redundantly to the lexeme processor. \bold{Posixification} - Many files were "Posixified", mostly by Todd Inglett. This meant converting to use posix defined libraries; in particular, strchr() and strrchr() are now used instead of index() and rindex(). The other things done relate to signal handling, particularly the return type, and to return values from wait. Also some prototypes were added under ifdef POSIX (related to signal handler functions), some, if not all of these have been expanded to test POSIX and __STDC__ separately, since under AIX we compile with POSIX compliance, but old style C. In this process various additional corrections from IBM Rochester were incorporated into the sources. \heading{Volume 2, number 1, April, 1993} Version 5.2.1 has been made available to members. Version 5.2.2 with the generator for stand-alone applications can be made available if you really want to try it. We have completed a User's Guide to the Andrew System. The User's Guide offers, for the first time, a comprehensive description of how to use the Andrew applications and insets. Chapters cover ez, help, typescript, messages, console, raster, figure, table, and many other facets of the system. The manual will be bundled with the CDrom and will be available separately for $15. \heading{Volume 2, number 2, June, 1993} I'm pleased to report that I will be presenting a paper at the IEEE 1993 Symposium on Visual Languages in Bergen, Norway. It is entitled: Andrew as a Multiparadigm Environment for Visual Languages. Individual releases of AUIS - From the earliest days of the Consortium, individuals have asked for memberships. It has never been practical to offer individual memberships, but we have now developed a new distribution license for individuals. This will be presented at the Annual Meeting (24 June). If approved, individuals will be able to get a copy of the latest sources for a nominal distribution charge. Licensing restrictions will accompany the distribution and limit the software to that one individual. \heading{Annual Meeting Reports} The annual meeting began with a review of last year's meeting where we decided to: improve documentation implement a drawing editor write a report on conversion to C++ Each of these tasks was accomplished or exceeded! In addition to incorporating proffered documentation, Andy Plotkin wrote a new User's Guide. Andy also wrote 'figure', a new drawing editor. With technical input from Todd Inglett and Rob Ryan, I wrote the C++ report, reluctantly concluding that we could convert. In a series of conversations and email messages I found no support for remaining with C despite the fact that we will accomplish little else this year. So the conversion began and has reached the stage where it is clearly successful. The new system was demonstrated. It could be argued that the demonstration was boring in that the converted system behaves exactly like the old; we prefer to argue that a conversion should indeed be exactly the same. The remainder of the year will be spent cleaning up, porting to more platforms, enhancing installability, and implementing dynamic loading--at least for platforms with shared libraries. We also discussed at the meeting the introduction of a three-dimensional membership fee structure to replace the present system based strictly on level of membership. The new structure would distinguish the size of the organization, the level of membership, and whether the organization was intended to turn a profit. No specific proposal was presented; these changes will not take place until membership years beginning in 1994. \heading{Annual Meeting Priorities for the year ahead} Discussion at the annual meeting, 24 June, 1993, was lively and established valuable priorities for the year ahead. Here are the notes on the priorities. We plan to do all priority 1 items and most of the 2's and 3's. \bold{1st Priority - Robustness} Ease of use No crashes No installation problems \bold{Platforms to be supported with C++ release} 1. RS/6000, HP/PA, PMAX Ultrix 2. Solaris 2, Alpha, Telmat 3. Pmax/Mach, Sun4/Mach, SGI 4. Linux, Win32/WinNt No support for non-ANSI C++ compilers require function prototypes Investigate g++ dynamic loader \bold{Widgets / Application Builder} Priority 2 - Regularize the widget suite (MIT views this as priority 3) clean up API clean up U/I improve consistency and documentation collect information at one access point provide an index to programmer documentation Priority 2 - Design application builder Priority 4 - Implement Application builder construction environment property editor generalized wrapper approach \bold{Printing (Priority 3 (MIT: 2))} eliminate Troff direct to PostScript make everything print clarify size negotiation multi-page insets multi-column text flow text around insets rotation 90 degree ? use gv; move preview to contrib \bold{Mail} No clear consensus on an overall mail strategy was reached, though there was consensus that there is a big market. priority 2 - IMAP for CMU priority 3 - make ezmail and macmail available try to get batmail out priority 4 - convert AMS to be a front end for various mail management archive formats consider making a distribution which is only AMS consider binary distributions of AUIS With these priorities, we will have enough to do in the coming year. It is our expectation that AUIS will be an increasingly attractive package, especially for end users, but also for C++ programmers.\ \enddata{text,7617152}