Re: Apple and CLIM

[keunen@milou.nrb.be]

   Subject: Re: Apple and CLIM
   To: KEUNEN@MILOU.NRB.BE
   From: ALCABES@AppleLink.Apple.COM (Alcabes, Harvey)
   Date: 21 Nov 91 22:13 GMT

Harvey,

Thank you for your personal answer.

   ...

   As long as a CLIM that works well with MCL will be available from a reliable
   company, do you know of any reason why it would have to come from Apple?
   Thanks.
 
I am not as much afraid of the future of CLIM for MCL as Randy seems to be.
However, from here (Belgium), it's difficult to "feel" how things evolve over
there.  Reading his message, I anticipated he could have good reasons to say so
(by the contacts he has had).

The advantages I see in Apple "getting closer" to CLIM are the following:

- Apple is more solid than ILA, so it's more of a guarantee for the product's
lifetime

- CLIM's acceptance would be more developed ("Apple officially supports CLIM")
therefore leading to more development from "out there"

- Apple's development efforts in MCL would be guaranteed to be "CLIM oriented"
(I'm thinking of things like the interface designer in MCL that doesn't seem
useful to CLIM based applications - Am I wrong ?  If Apple truly supports CLIM,
they might invest in a CLIM interface designer that would be very useful to
developers of the MCL community - or the general CLIM community...)

- Apple could push forward the development of CLIM, according to their excellent
expertise of the man/machine interface. For the moment, CLIM comes from
Symbolics ideas of the user interface.  They have some very good ideas, but
so does Apple.  Having Apple participate in the standard establishment could be
very good for CLIM (all other major players use "command line" oriented computers;
Apple is the only one who has a pure and complete graphical UI).

- I just heard of the philosophy behind CLIM 2.0 and I think it's a good idea
(and very important for CLIM's acceptance).  However good the MAC/CLIM2 
developers are, having Apple close would help very much in "bringing CLIM
closer to the Mac's style of doing things".

- Finally, lisp has always been an experimentation field.  Working on CLIM
(which I consider a quite advanced user interface manager, compared to others
I know) could also benefit Apple's view of things and help evolve the UI in
the right directions (How about letting a button clicked on in a black pattern,
as long as the action is not finished - how many users click several times because
they think the action didn't happen ?  How will you get feedback to the user in a
real multiprocess application, where several actions can be started without waiting
for the previous one to stop?  What about windows shared by several applications ?
How will the user scripting/command line inputting be integrated in the Mac interface...)


Here are a few ideas.  Hope you can make use of them!


Vincent