Talk:NeWS

Confusion between DPS and NeWS

I've never heard anyone confuse DPS and NeWS, so I'm not sure why it would be "common belief". The two are discussed below in context, so I'm going to remove this sentence. Maury 23:19, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I agree the wording of the sentence was bad. Perhaps it should be changed to something like "Despite their ties in PostScript" etc. However, didn't you remove too much when information comparing the two systems were blown off the article? Kowloonese 00:46, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I would say 100% of the people I have met who have heard of NeWS believe it is some kind of adaption of DPS by Sun and that it uses Adobe code. That is why I initially put that text in, to try to dispell this misconception.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 218.124.84.226 (talk • contribs) 16:55, March 30, 2006

Screenshots?

Can anyone add some screenshots? I think it would be good.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.236.216.253 (talk • contribs) 15:05, December 23, 2005

Both sides in two languages - really?

This statement:

"Writing NeWS apps required coding both client-side code and server-side code in two different programming languages."

Means that the client-side was written in two different languages, AND that the server-side was written in two different languages. Is this really what was intended? 24.84.168.252 sroberts

Certainly not. I've clarified this sentence.--Jec 02:47, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

comments on NeWS

We had a stub generator that would convert from a marked up C file and generate convenience stubs for going between NeWS and C. It was nasty and ugly and something I really never liked and desperately wanted to change.. never did..

The NeWS/X11 merge was remarkable in that David Rosenthal (writter of the ICCCM for X11 which defines how cut/paste works) said it was just a few weeks of work and a Awk script or two. In the end it took us 200 programmers over 2 years to pull off and required a complete rewrite of both the X11 and the NeWS engines from the ground up.

The team was broken up as follows for the X11 merge

• 2 programmers did the NeWS interpreter, NeWS/X11 window manager, NeWS terminal emulators, NeWS debuggers, NeWS/X11 integration, and memory management
• 6 programmers did the TNT/NeWS toolkit and NeWS openlook implementation
• 20 programmers did the X11 rewrite
• 100+ programmers worked on the OpenLook tools on top of X11

While it is true that it was ugly, it was a very powerful system that you could do amazing things with...

--josh siegel
(Author of the NeWS interpreter from NeWS 2.1 until its death..) —Preceding unsigned comment added by MouseJstr (talk • contribs) 19:23, November 1, 2007

Looking for original NeWS "eyeball tracking the mouse" program

I've just added a cross-link to xeyes, which was inspired by a Jeremy Huxtable NeWS version shown at SIGGRAPH. I've also added a link to Jeremy's posting on comp.windows.news, which serves as an example of NeWS programming.

So far so good, but what I'd really like to to is get my name up there in lights, because I claim to have written the very first such app, in NeWS, at Queen Mary College (University of London), back in late 1986. Mine was superior - it used a round canvas for the eye, a round child canvas for the pupil, and allowed the centre of the pupil to go as far at the edge of the eye, relying on NeWS to clip the result to give a proper cartoon eyeball effect. I also remember that it exposed what I felt was a bug, namely that the position of the child canvas was not specified relative to the origin of the parent canvas. I've got at least one colleague who remembers it and can place the date, but I'm unable to find any other hard evidence of it. I've also failed to contact Jeremy Huxtable, to find out if he remembers seeing my version, or if his idea arose spontaneously.

Is this a proper use of Wikipedia? Can any of you NeWS folk remember my version?

William Roberts W t roberts (talk) 11:41, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

"what I'd really like to to is get my name up there in lights"

+1 honesty... :-)

"Is this a proper use of Wikipedia?"

If this is part of the history of xeyes, which itself is allegedly notable in that no one has deleted its article yet, than it could go there. But you'd need verification, and use of WP for self-promotion is strongly frowned upon, so "name up in lights", not so much.--NapoliRoma (talk) 17:06, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

NeWSprint

No mention of NeWSprint? Can't remember many of the details at this point, but it was essentially a host based print system. I did quite a bit with SCSI attached laser printers using technology acquired from SRS. The SGI IRIX equivalent was Impressario. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 23:21, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

External Programs?

Maurie made an edit to this sentence, adding "without the support of an external program", which I agree with (having written many such internal NeWS programs that didn't require the support of external programs):

"Like PostScript, NeWS could be used as a complete programming language, but unlike PostScript, NeWS could be used to make complete interactive programs with mouse support and a GUI, without the support of an external program."

But the Spitzak undid the revision with this comment:

Undid revision 436531449 by Maury Markowitz (talk) Actually pure PS could not no matter how much helped

Trying my best to interpret this ungrammatical comment, he seems to be trying to say that "pure PS" could not [be used to make complete interactive programs with mouse support and a GUI] no matter how much [it is] helped [by an external program].

That is simply wrong. And "pure PS" has nothing to do with it. We're discussing "NeWS PS" which is certainly not "pure PS", and includes all kinds of extensions for light weight threading, file handing, networking, etc, that can be used to implement all kinds of stand-alone programs that run in the NeWS server without the support of an external program. For example, I wrote a VT100 emulator that could open outgoing telnet connections, completely in NeWS PostScript.

Or am I misinterpreting him? If not, then I suggest we put back the phrase " without the support of an external program".

Xardox (talk) 18:59, 26 September 2011 (UTC)

Maybe the whole thing could be re-written, I'm not sure its clear in either form. Maury Markowitz (talk) 19:13, 26 September 2011 (UTC)

I see how I misinterpreted the sentence, it was saying "NeWS could do this without an external program". I interpreted it as saying "PostScript had the ability to use an external program to make a GUI", which is ludicrous because it is certainly not unique to PostScript (I can make the random() call into an interactive program by adding enough "external" code!). Anyway I think I just misread it in a very strange way and I think you should undo my edit.Spitzak (talk) 19:26, 26 September 2011 (UTC)

End of Line

“After it was clear that OPEN LOOK had lost out to Motif in popularity, and after Adobe acquired FrameMaker, Sun stopped supporting NeWS.[citation needed] Products based on NeWS stopped being developed.[when?]”

The product manager of OpenWindows at the time told me [personal conversation] that Sun had cut a deal with Adobe whereby Adobe would port Photoshop and Illustrator to Solaris if Sun dropped NeWS and went with Display Postscript. He went to work for Adobe shortly afterwards.

I was a beta tester for Altsys Virtuoso on Sun/NeWS; it was awesome and was about ready to go to market when the announcement happened.

I don't think it was related to Adobe buying FrameMaker. There were probably more applications being sold for SunOS and Solaris than any other single Unix variant, and with libraries that could switch between Motif and Open Look appearance, i also don't think Motif popualarity was really an issue. For sure it wasn't because people wanted the Common Desktop Environment (CDE); when Sun moved to gnome, they still had more customers using the open look environment than cde [source: private conversation, sorry]

I propose to remove the FrameMaker and Motif comments. Note that Motif worked fine on xnews, and therefore did not necessitate a change, and XView and OLIT applications worked fine on X Window System servers without NeWS. However, the framemaker acquisition may well have been a factor along with the pressure for photoshop and illustrator (i have a CD-ROM with Photoshop 2.5 for Solaris right here in 2004!)

Barefootliam (talk) 23:56, 5 September 2024 (UTC)