November 91 - WAMADA Notes
WAMADA Notes
Leslie Jeffries
SEPTEMBER-
UserLand IAC Toolkit & Frontier
Dave Buell of Advanced Laser Graphics gave the group an overview of Dave Winer's Frontier at
the WAMADA meeting in September. Frontier allows end users to script applications on the
Macintosh that support Apple Events. Frontier also comes with predefined verbs that act as the
primitives for developing further scripts.
After Dave gave us a feel for what Frontier is capable of, he presented the IAC Toolkit.
At Advanced Laser Graphics, Dave is making an effort to integrate the IAC Toolkit with MacApp
3. He's made some progress; however, there are apparently some problems in completing the
integration of the IAC Toolkit with the existing MacApp 3 framework.
OCTOBER-Apple Events,
The Object Model & MacApp
Our celebrity speaker for October was Eric Berdahl, who was in Washington to demo his project
at a trade show. Berdahl began his presentation with an introduction to AppleEvents, the
AppleEvent Object Model, and the Object Support Library. The terminology involved in all this
was kind of overwhelming for the group, but you could see the light bulb turn on over the heads
of some members. I think it's comparable to the feeling when you "get" object programming:
you're beginning to understand it, then you get really confused-but then the fog clears, and
BAMM! you really understand the entire concept. After that you can't think any other way.
Once we were all speaking the same language, Berdahl walked us through his
modifications to MacApp 3.0b2PQR to support the Object Model and the Object Support Library.
There was a lot of interest as to whether Berdahl's modifications will be similar to the final
support available in a (yet unspecified) future release of MacApp that will support these
concepts. Berdahl was infinitely patient with our questions; we left the meeting with a much
better understanding of AppleEvents and MacApp.
Attending Berdahl's talk made us the guinea pigs for his session at the 1992 MADA
Conference. I strongly recommend that you attend his session in Orlando.
IcePick Demo
Since Eric had a copy of IcePick on his SyQuest cartridge, we coaxed him into a quick
demonstration. IcePick is a tool under development by Chris Arbogast that allows you to create
your views and actually try them out. There are some wonderful features in IcePick: it
automatically creates Rez source for your views, and can display your view hierarchy in an
outline format.
Upcoming in November-Dinker
Kurt Schmucker will be at WAMADA in November to discuss the Dynamic Linker project
(Dinker) under development at Apple's ATG East office in Columbia, Maryland. You won't want
to miss this one!
Since June, the Washington D.C. area MADA group makes its home at McDonnell Douglas
in Tyson's Corner, Virginia. Thanks to Mark Gerl and Yvon Perrault, this new meeting location
is available every third Wednesday of the month from 7:15 p.m. until we decide to close. If you
need a map, send a message to me at JEFFRIES.L on AppleLink or call (301) 340-5126 during
business hours (EST)
