A Small Plug for CLIM on the Mac...

[Curt Stevens <stevens@sigi.cs.colorado.edu>]

I would like to take this opportunity to put in a small plug for CLIM on
the Macintosh. I have been expending my recent efforts in the direction
of porting my news reading system (InfoScope, CHI '91 proceedings, pg 63)
from the Symbolics to the Macintosh using ILA's port of the CLIM
environment. I would like to recommend this path for those of you, who
like me, feel that they would like their systems to run on a machine that
is available to more people than Symbolics machines. CLIM offers a nice
compromise between remaining in the SYmbolics environment and having to
reimplement from the bottom up using Macintosh primitives (whether they
be in C, Lisp or whatever). It is true that not everything about CLIM is
consistent with the Macintosh interface, but systems created on the
Symbolics using presentation types do not need to be completed
reimplemented. CLIM on the Mac represents an excellent interim solution
for people wishing to move towards the Mac environment. In addition, for
those who do not require systems that conform exactly to the Mac
interface guidelines (it certainly never bothered me when I was
developing research projects on the Symbolics :->), CLIM is an excellent
high level development environment. Running in this environment allows
one to cross-develop between the Mac and Symbolics, while enabling
demonstrations to be offered on a Mac. I can't begin to tell you how many
times people have wanted a demo of my system but were unable to run it
because of the need for a Symbolics. Let me clearly state that I am not
flaming Symbolics (or their fine hardware and software). I have been a
developer on those machines since the Version 6 days and I love them. I
just wanted to say that there are significant pluses to porting systems
to CLIM (including the ability to run them on the Mac).

I would also like to say something about ILA in particular. I have
received excellent support from the people there. Each time I have found
a bug, or something that is so far away from Mac standards as to be
unacceptable, they have responded VERY quickly with a patch or fix. Not
once have I received the dreaded "sorry" response I receive all too often
when dealing with software developers.

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|Curt Stevens   (303) 492-1218 | / | arpa:stevens@sigi.cs.colorado.edu |
|Univ. of Colorado, Boulder    |o o| uucp:{ncar|nbires}!boulder!stevens|
|Computer Sci. Dept. ECOT 7-7  | | |-----------------------------------|
|Campus Box 430                |\_/| I contradict myself? Very well, I |
|Boulder, Colorado 80309  USA  |   | contradict myself. - Walt Whitman |
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