Newsbits

By Scott T Boyd, Editor

OpenDoc Gets a Shot In The Arm

Adobe Systems agreed to join CILabs, the vendor-neutral association promoting OpenDoc. Adobe will provide financial support to the non-profit organization. In addition to incorporating OpenDoc technology into their applications, Adobe will also develop OpenDoc parts for their major video and graphics applications, allowing display and printing of documents in the content formats of Illustrator, Photoshop, and Premiere. Adobe’s full sponsorship follows closely on the heels of Lotus Development’s joining CILabs in August.

Get Thee To the Internet

Kaleidospace, a commercial Internet site for the promotion and distribution of independent art is asking for contributions to online collaborative work by famous artists. Internet users can add to stories, graphic novels, music and even videos started by the celebrity artists. Kaleidospace also promotes, distributes, and sells works by independent artists, musicians, writers, performers, animators, filmmakers, CD-ROM authors and software developers.

Kaleidospace, http://kspace.com, PO Box 341556, Los Angeles, CA 90034. (310) 399-4349 voice, (310) 396-5489 fax, editors@kspace.com.

PPCCode Tracer

Posted to macgifts@mac.archive.umich.edu, a first release of Peter J. Creath’s Janus (0.1). Think of this as the PPC native equivalent of the ResEdit CODE editor. In layman’s terms, Janus is a fat binary which lets you find the PowerPC native code corresponding to 680x0 code. Now you can patch your favorite native games to give yourself infinite ammo and lives too! NOTE: This is not for the faint of heart. If you can figure out the 680x0 patches on your own, this is for you. If not, find somebody who can.

Peter can be reached at pjcreath@phoenix.princeton.edu.

Recommended Reading

The UNIX-Haters Handbook, by Simson Garfinkel, Daniel Weise & Steven Strassmann IDG Books, $16.95, ISBN 1-56884-203-1 with foreword by Donald Norman, Apple Computer, and anti-foreword by Dennis Ritchie, AT&T. Comes recommended by a number of our readers.

Put Congress In Your Pocket

Now available: the 103rd Congress, a book for the Newton. The 103rd Congress directory lists all members of the United States House of Representatives and Senate. Included is the member’s phone number, fax number, mailing address in Washington DC, and committee assignments.

$25.00. Iverson Software Co., P. O. Box 3, Rice Lake WI 54868-0003. For more info, call Jeff Iverson at (715) 236-7918.

Add Spellchecking To Your App

SpellWright is a new royalty free spellchecking toolkit from LexTek Int’l. designed for applications which don’t presently have spellchecking capabilities and as a replacement for spellcheckers which either have expensive licensing fees or are hampered by poor performance.

SpellWright supports five different languages: American English, British English, Dutch, French, and Spanish. Supplemental dictionaries cover Legal, Medical, Names, Pharmaceutical, Post Offices, Religion, and Science. SpellWright provides accurate suggestions, checks for capitalization errors, double word errors, or look up words by pattern.

For more information, contact LexTek International at 2255 N. University Parkway, Suite 15, Provo, UT 84604. (801) 375-8332 voice, (801) 377-7654 fax.

New ScriptGen

StepUp Software today announced that it is shipping ScriptGen Pro 2.0, which adds support for Apple’s new Installer 4.0, boasts speed increases over 400%, and adds developer hooks for customization. Installer action atoms, setup functions, and rules can be ‘plugged’ into any script.

ScriptGen Pro 2.0 supports the Installer’s new ‘application folder interface’ which allows users to select where application files are installed. Hierarchical views of custom packages are now supported. Easy Install rules - including System 6 versus System 7 and gestalt tests - are new to version 2.0. Folders can be installed, eliminating the need to provide script information for every file included in the installation.

ScriptGen Pro version 2.0, reengineered for speed, generates scripts greater than 400% faster than previous versions. Typical 2.0 documents require less than one-third the disk space of earlier versions. ScriptGen Pro supports decompression of Stuffit, Diamond, and Compact Pro format archives, with additional software.

$169. Upgrades $49 Canada/US, $59 elsewhere. Free demo is available on AppleLink (Third Party Demos:Developer Tools), CompuServe (MACDEV), America Online (MDV), and e-World (Straight to the Source:Info Samples:StepUp Software).