Oct 95 Newsbits
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Volume Number: 11
Issue Number: 10
Column Tag: Newsbits
By John Kawakami, MacTech Magazine Editorial Assistant
Claris Emailer Brings it All Together
Claris Emailer is an easy to use, powerful email package which retrieves your email
from SMTP servers on an internet, America Online, CompuServe, eWorld, and
RadioMail, then saves the messages into a single In box. Best of all, it supports all the
features expected of a modern Macintosh application, and then some: extensive
drag-and-drop support for enclosures, addressing, text clipping, and filing;
Quicken-style text expansion features; filters and automation. If you are a small
business with multiple email accounts on multiple online services, Emailer is
essential.
[If I may get on the soapbox for a moment, I’ll detail a few deficiencies. There’s
no support for any kind of “white pages” network directory service, eWorld and AOL
email (which normally allows styled text) loses text styling, and enclosures are not
filed with the message. - Ed. jtk]
General Magic Developers Conference
Oct 29 - 31, 1995
A conference for anyone who develops, manufactures, or supports communication
products and services: hardware manufacturers, software developers, marketing
decision makers, and content providers.
Highlights
• Two jam-packed days of conference sessions
• Product demos and sneak previews
• Special CD-ROM for conference attendees only, containing code, tools, and
documentation
• DTS engineers will meet with you in the Hang-out room, where they will be
hanging out all day long
• A not-to-be-missed Spellbinding Magic Halloween Bash
Dates: Sunday October 29 to Tuesday October 31.
Location: Red Lion Hotel, San Jose, 2050 Gateway Place, San Jose, CA 95110, (408)
453-4000 Registration fee: $395, $495 after October 13.
Phone: (800) IN-THE-HAT x4273; fax: 800-774-3311; email:
magic_devcon@genmagic.com; web: http://www.genmagic.com/
Apprentice Release 3:
Cd-Rom Of Over 640 Megabytes Of Mac Source Code
Port Townsend, Washington - Celestin Company, Inc. ships Apprentice release 3.
Apprentice contains over 640 megabytes of programmer utilities and up-to-date
source code in CodeWarrior, Symantec, and MPW projects for C, C++, and Pascal.
In order to compile such an exhaustive collection of quality source code, Celestin
Company contacted over 200 Macintosh developers and received their permission to
include some of the best programming examples available. Users will find complete
working examples of applications, games, control panels, extensions, utilities, and
much more.
Apprentice contains more than 20 complete standalone programming
environments. Ada, C, Forth, Lisp, Modula-2, Oberon, and Prolog are only a few of the
languages included. Most come with complete documentation and programming
examples, and some include complete source code to the language itself.
The information hungry will find technical specifications, language guidelines,
programming hints, as well as a complete collection of the comp.sys.mac.programmer
digest, a compendium of information from one of the best Mac programmer discussion
groups on the electronic networks. Also included are demonstration versions of
commercial programmer utilities, including installers, code and resource editors,
database libraries, and much more.
Celestin Company, Inc. phone: (360) 385-3767; fax: (360) 385-3586; email:
info@celestin.com; index of contents:
ftp://ftp.celestin.com/biz/celestin/apprentice
FilterTop Builds Pipes on the Macintosh
FilterTop is a an easy to use, graphical, batch processing utility for files. It allows
users to perform a series of “filtration” operations on files. The user constructs
“pipes” by dragging into place “pipe” icons, which have input and output ports, that
represent filter modules. A set of Filters can be saved as a very small application,
called a TopLet, onto which files can be dropped to initiate processing. FilterTop is
threaded, will run multiple filters concurrently, and is AppleEvent driven so other
applications can use FilterTop.
Under the hood, FilterTop is designed by programmers for programmers. The
API is simple, and the FilterTop environment takes care of the user interface details.
Anyone who misses unix shell pipes, or anyone who wants to share their filters with
non-programmers will want to try out FilterTop.
TopSoft is an Internet-based Macintosh Programming group. Its mission is to
develop innovative high-quality free or minimal cost software. TopSoft is a non-profit
organization and membership is open to anyone interested in participating in
Internet-based cooperative projects.
FilterTop is available free via ftp from topsoft.org:
ftp://ftp.topsoft.org/Visitors/ Also email: info@topsoft.org; web:
http://www.topsoft.org
Apple Rolls Out Newest Version
of QuickTime for Macintosh
QuickTime 2.1 is out and features more support for more data formats, better text
support, support for animated sprites that move over the movie, and 256 color
Cinepack. The QuickTime 2.1 for Macintosh runtime software is available immediately
for end-users, for US$9.95. But don’t rush out to buy it, because developers can
license the software for redistribution with applications, titles and media clip free of
charge. The Software Developers Kit (SDK) for developers is expected to be available
in late 1995, for a price of US$99.
Apple Computer, web: http://quicktime.apple.com/
Foresight Technology Releases NetLink™/4DConnects 4D and SQL
Databases to the World Wide Web
NetLink/4D is an easy-to-use package for using 4th Dimension with StarNine
Technologies’ WebSTAR and MacHTTP World Wide Web servers. This powerful
combination of a comprehensive web server and full-featured relational database
enables flexible database queries and forms-based access to a web server by web
browsers.
NetLink/4D communicates with WebSTAR using the Common Gateway Interface
(CGI) in the form of Apple Events. NetLink/4D performs all the Apple Event handling
and provides a simple, intuitive command set for sending replies back to WebSTAR in
the form of HTML scripts and images in GIF and JPEG formats. The combination of
NetLink/4D and WebSTAR is fast. Search times of a test 1500 record database are
consistently less than a second.
NetLink/4D for 4D manages multiple simultaneous communications between
WebSTAR and 4th Dimension using 4D’s multi-tasking architecture. This allows
multiple web clients like Netscape to simultaneously perform database actions such as
form-based queries and data entry.
Foresight Technology, Inc. 4100 International Plaza, Suite 538, Fort Worth,
Texas, 76109. Phone: (800) 701-9393, (817) 731-4444; fax: (817)
731-9304; email sales@fsti.com or info@fsti.com; web:
http://www.fsti.com/
MachTen Unix, Faster, Smaller, Native!
MachTen Power Unix Release 4.0, accelerated for Power PC, is the only UNIX available
for Power Macintosh and clones. The package contains a complete software
development environment including C, C++, source level debugger, and Fortran, all
generating Power PC code. Also included is a high performance X server and an X11R5
client development environment with a Motif toolkit.
The tools can generate Power PC Executable Format (PEF) files that can integrate
directly with other Macintosh development tools. Thus, it’s possible to develop UNIX
applications with Macintosh interfaces.
Improvements to the kernel have resulted in a smaller runtime RAM footprint
and faster execution. The loader supports dynamic linking to shared libraries, (which
reduces RAM usage by around 50%) and memory mapped file access (which improves
efficiency by deferring the allocation of instruction memory until reference to a
specific ‘page’ is made).
MachTen continues to improve their internet support as well, providing httpd,
BBEdit 3.5, domain name service, mail software, and other networking tools that come
with BSD 4.4. [These tools are handy to have if you are debugging an IP network. -jk]
Tenon Intersystems, phone: (805) 963-6983 ; fax: (805) 962-8202 ; email:
info@tenon.com ; web: http://www.tenon.com
Motorola Announces Compiler Update
for the Power Macintosh
Motorola RISC Software announced feature enhancements to Motorola’s C/C++ and
FORTRAN Software Development Kits (SDK) for the Power Macintosh. The update to
Motorola’s C/C++ and FORTRAN SDKs will be available in the early fourth quarter of
1995.
As a new addition to Motorola’s software development tools - and beginning with
this update to the C/C++ and FORTRAN SDKs, Power Macintosh Edition - Motorola
announced a bundling agreement with Kuck and Associates, Inc. (KAI) to include KAP
tools with SDKs for the Power Macintosh, Windows NT and UNIX platforms.
With over a decade of success in providing optimization and parallelization for
the supercomputer and workstation markets, Kuck and Associates’ Preprocessor
(KAP) provides software that, when used in conjunction with an optimizing compiler,
can provide significant performance increases for a broad class of FORTRAN and C
programs.
Motorola, web: http://www.mot.com/PowerPC/
StuffIt Expander for Windows (Weenies)
There’s now a Stuffit Expander for Windows, so all your friends who simply refuse to
use the superior operating system can open StuffIt files. Just remind them which
machine ran this cool software first. Freeware from Aladdin Systems,
ftp://ftp.aladdinsys.com/
Consume Your Copious Free Time
More Efficiently with URL Organizers
Recently, interesting tools to manage your URLs have been unleashed: GrabNet and
ClayBasket are noted in the URLs column. A similar program, named CyberFinder, was
created at MacHack this August. CyberFinder allows you to save URLs as Finder items,
and then open then with a double-click; this brings to mind the CyberDog demo at
WWDC that had everyone wide-eyed and smiling. Cool!
Available at an Info-Mac archive site. CD ROM publisher Pacific Hi-Tech sells
an Info-Mac CD ROM and runs an archive mirror at ftp://ftp.pht.com