Hi,
At 11:28 am -0500 28/3/00, Robin Popplestone wrote:
>I don't know if AlphaPop still works on modern macs I'd rather doubt
>it. Robin.
Sadly, AlphaPop did not make the transition to the modern memory
management scheme. I believe (but this may be rubbish) that they
exploited the fact that the old Mac O/S could only address 24-bits
for tagging - and this changed, as it was bound to change, and Cog.
App. had seen too little financial return to continue.
This summer we will see the launch of MacOS X, of course, and this
is a true UNIX. I am absolutely confident that an impromptu
development team will form to port Poplog for MacOS X. I have come
perilously close to getting the DP3 (dev preview 3) release for this.
Alas, my spare time is negligible at the moment or I would already be
hacking.
I am not sure how long this port will take since MacOS X is a
POSIX compliant UNIX and (I think) Poplog has been ported to the
PPC architecture already. I reckon a raw port would be a matter
of a couple of months. What gets interesting after that is what
to do about VED and X.
MacOS X has the most exciting graphics layer of any popular OS -
Quartz (display PDF), OpenGL, and Quicktime. X-windows will not
be bundled (hurrah) and totally irrelevant anyway. XVED is therefore
inappropriate. So a reimplementation of VED is required.
At this point I get very excited! Why not implement a new editor
with a proper rich-text model? How about making it powerful
enough to embed HTML? How about augmenting Poplog with a full
set of UI building components to make constructing new editors
straightforward?! I'm definitely up for this!
Steve
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