From: Craig Hubley Subject: NewWave, Help, Agents, Access bus (was Re: System 7 and Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1991 06:30:54 -0400 Organization: UTCS Public Access In article <1991Oct10.193639.6033@milton.u.washington.edu> salnick@dejavu.spk. wa.us (Bob Salnick) writes: >daley@taurus.cs.nps.navy.mil (John Daley) wrote about Apple Guides. > >I have not seen the Apple Guide, but from the descriptions I have read of it >here in sci.virtual-worlds, this sounds like a take-off of the X windows New- >Wave Desktop's "Agent" (who will do ANYthing, including provide help). NewWave is also available for MS-Windows. In fact, it makes MS-Windows into a reasonable and reliable environment, which is saying a great deal. PC Week chose it over MS-Windows 3.0 (alone) as "product of the year" I believe. >Is there anyone who has experience with both who can provide a cogent >comparison? Yes, but you should distinguish between the "Guides" project, which is about putting a friendly face, with a personality, on a database of information, and the balloon help mechanism that the posting was about. Help need not have a face or personality but a "Guide" does, by definition. There is a similar mechanism in an upcoming (current?) release of SunOS. There are more general mechanisms in System 7.0 (collectively called IAC or Inter-Application Communications) including the much-publicized "Publish and Subscribe" and Apple Events. SunOS has similar capabilities in its Link Services and ToolTalk. These are IMHO knockoffs of the NewWave capabilities which are superior (and complementary, on those platforms to which NewWave has been ported) in most respects. The Agent is indeed more general: end users can automate their tasks, record their actions as scripts, etc. There is no need for a specialized Help mechanism when any Agent can send a "PLEASE HELP" message to an application which will answer based on its current state. Really the Microsoft Windows, Apple System 7.0, and Sun ToolTalk capabilities are an underlying layer, on top of which HP and DEC have built their tools which do far more than any of these operating system facilities do on their own. They don't really compete. There are two clearly defined layers here. HP and Sun collaborated on the Unix NewWave, called OpenWave, which uses Sun ToolTalk. HP and Microsoft are collaborating on Windows OLE 2.0 so that MS-Windows applications will all take full advantage of the NewWave capabilities. HP and DEC and other major vendors (e.g. Sun, NCR) collaborated on the Object Management Group's "Common Object Request Broker Architecture" which will be available for all popular platforms. Including, I believe, the Mac. Despite Apple's lawsuit vs. HP and Microsoft. Far from providing a general capability that developers "can build on", Apple seems once again to be isolating itself by teaming up with IBM and trying to build a proprietary OO operating system. This may end up as a fine product but it will take years and in the meantime developers may have to choose between IBM/Apple and "the rest of the industry" when deciding which set of APIs to build upon. In fairness, IBM and Apple belong to the OMG. But both joined late and didn't contribute any technology to the new standard. And in a recent poll of corporate end-users, guess which two companies were voted "least open" and "most proprietary" ? I'll give you a hint - Apple finally beat IBM in a corporate opinion poll. :) I am not Apple or IBM bashing. IBM has a huge installed base to consider and Apple has managed to move the entire industry forward by innovating in key areas (such as GUIs) and inspiring imitations. However, one has to wonder whether they can keep up enough value-added in enough different areas (object oriented software, multimedia, networking) to continue to justify their proprietary stance. In my view you have to be much "better" to justify "different" in an industry where standards and interoperability are so important. As another example, DEC asked Apple to license its Desktop Bus but Apple refused and so DEC developed its own specification based on a shielded RJ12 plug that does exactly what ADB does. This is called Access.bus, it is in the public domain and an ACE standard. But for a brief moment it was possible to establish one standard for all end-user input devices. Imagine what that would have meant to VR, to the diff-abled (or disabled, if you aren't into the latest P.C. lingo), and to those of us who need to move to a Dvorak keyboard before we get carpal tunnel syndrome but can't until they are guaranteed that they will be able to plug their keyboard into any box they need to work on... I think we all have good reason to be pissed at Apple but it would be more constructive to work on getting Access.bus established as an ANSI, IEEE, CCITT and ISO standard. Craig Hubley -- Consultants in object-oriented technology & techniques, -- Craig Hubley & Associates -- user interface design & user productivity -- craig@gpu.utcs.Utoronto.CA UUNET!utai!utgpu!craig craig@utorgpu.BITNET craig@gpu.utcs.toronto.EDU {allegra,bnr-vpa,decvax}!utcsri!utgpu!craig 28 First Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M4M 1W8 Canada (US TC) call 416-466-4097