Re: Future Plans for MCL

[kentw@bellcore.com (Kent Wittenburg)]

I'd like to add my voice to those arguing that Apple should continue
development of MCL and give a high priority to finding a way to a
native PowerPC port. I'll wear an industry hat here since that point
of view has not been represented as well in the flurry of recent 
messages on this topic.

As an enthusiastic user, I too can attest to the fact that the
presence of MCL has directly led to purchases of Macs in our
organization and elsewhere. And I'm afraid I too would have to
reconsider my platform unless there were better news forthcoming
from Apple.

But more importantly for Apple's bottom line, a viable MCL product
along with a native PowerPC implementation can play a crucial role in
accelerating product development in a new market that Apple considers
a top priority.  The fact that macs have already penetrated into many
of the corporate offices of telecommunications and media companies
means that, in combination with MCL, it becomes possible for
researchers and advanced developers to put MCL prototyped applications
directly in the hands of potential customers and decision makers. I
don't think I need to convince anyone here of MCL's merits for quickly
prototyping "intelligent" multimedia applications.  But it has also
proved to be invaluable for quickly bringing these prototypes to the
stage where they can actually be passed around, tried out, and used to
get real work done.  With a native PowerPC implementation, it even
becomes plausible to consider actual supported products being built on
MCL and creating a much tighter relationship between research and
software development.  Also, MCL could even compete as a multi-platform
environment (assuming Mac OS appears on other platforms) for more
numerically-intensive multimedia and graphics applications.


--

Kent Wittenburg
Computer Graphics and Interactive Media Research
Bellcore, Rm. MRE 2A-347 
445 South St. 
Morristown, NJ 07962-1910