Newsbits

By John Kawakami, MacTech Magazine Editorial Assistant

Claris Emailer Brings it All Together

Claris Emailer is an easy to use, powerful email package which retrieves your email from SMTP servers on an internet, America Online, CompuServe, eWorld, and RadioMail, then saves the messages into a single In box. Best of all, it supports all the features expected of a modern Macintosh application, and then some: extensive drag-and-drop support for enclosures, addressing, text clipping, and filing; Quicken-style text expansion features; filters and automation. If you are a small business with multiple email accounts on multiple online services, Emailer is essential.

[If I may get on the soapbox for a moment, I’ll detail a few deficiencies. There’s no support for any kind of “white pages” network directory service, eWorld and AOL email (which normally allows styled text) loses text styling, and enclosures are not filed with the message. - Ed. jtk]

General Magic Developers Conference
Oct 29 - 31, 1995

A conference for anyone who develops, manufactures, or supports communication products and services: hardware manufacturers, software developers, marketing decision makers, and content providers.

Highlights

• Two jam-packed days of conference sessions

• Product demos and sneak previews

• Special CD-ROM for conference attendees only, containing code, tools, and documentation

• DTS engineers will meet with you in the Hang-out room, where they will be hanging out all day long

• A not-to-be-missed Spellbinding Magic Halloween Bash

Dates: Sunday October 29 to Tuesday October 31.

Location: Red Lion Hotel, San Jose, 2050 Gateway Place, San Jose, CA 95110, (408) 453-4000 Registration fee: $395, $495 after October 13.

Phone: (800) IN-THE-HAT x4273; fax: 800-774-3311; email: magic_devcon@genmagic.com; web: http://www.genmagic.com/

Apprentice Release 3:
Cd-Rom Of Over 640 Megabytes Of Mac Source Code

Port Townsend, Washington - Celestin Company, Inc. ships Apprentice release 3. Apprentice contains over 640 megabytes of programmer utilities and up-to-date source code in CodeWarrior, Symantec, and MPW projects for C, C++, and Pascal.

In order to compile such an exhaustive collection of quality source code, Celestin Company contacted over 200 Macintosh developers and received their permission to include some of the best programming examples available. Users will find complete working examples of applications, games, control panels, extensions, utilities, and much more.

Apprentice contains more than 20 complete standalone programming environments. Ada, C, Forth, Lisp, Modula-2, Oberon, and Prolog are only a few of the languages included. Most come with complete documentation and programming examples, and some include complete source code to the language itself.

The information hungry will find technical specifications, language guidelines, programming hints, as well as a complete collection of the comp.sys.mac.programmer digest, a compendium of information from one of the best Mac programmer discussion groups on the electronic networks. Also included are demonstration versions of commercial programmer utilities, including installers, code and resource editors, database libraries, and much more.

Celestin Company, Inc. phone: (360) 385-3767; fax: (360) 385-3586; email: info@celestin.com; index of contents: ftp://ftp.celestin.com/biz/celestin/apprentice

FilterTop Builds Pipes on the Macintosh

FilterTop is a an easy to use, graphical, batch processing utility for files. It allows users to perform a series of “filtration” operations on files. The user constructs “pipes” by dragging into place “pipe” icons, which have input and output ports, that represent filter modules. A set of Filters can be saved as a very small application, called a TopLet, onto which files can be dropped to initiate processing. FilterTop is threaded, will run multiple filters concurrently, and is AppleEvent driven so other applications can use FilterTop.

Under the hood, FilterTop is designed by programmers for programmers. The API is simple, and the FilterTop environment takes care of the user interface details. Anyone who misses unix shell pipes, or anyone who wants to share their filters with non-programmers will want to try out FilterTop.

TopSoft is an Internet-based Macintosh Programming group. Its mission is to develop innovative high-quality free or minimal cost software. TopSoft is a non-profit organization and membership is open to anyone interested in participating in Internet-based cooperative projects.

FilterTop is available free via ftp from topsoft.org: ftp://ftp.topsoft.org/Visitors/ Also email: info@topsoft.org; web: http://www.topsoft.org

Apple Rolls Out Newest Version
of QuickTime for Macintosh

QuickTime 2.1 is out and features more support for more data formats, better text support, support for animated sprites that move over the movie, and 256 color Cinepack. The QuickTime 2.1 for Macintosh runtime software is available immediately for end-users, for US$9.95. But don’t rush out to buy it, because developers can license the software for redistribution with applications, titles and media clip free of charge. The Software Developers Kit (SDK) for developers is expected to be available in late 1995, for a price of US$99.

Apple Computer, web: http://quicktime.apple.com/

Foresight Technology Releases NetLink™/4DConnects 4D and SQL Databases to the World Wide Web

NetLink/4D is an easy-to-use package for using 4th Dimension with StarNine Technologies’ WebSTAR and MacHTTP World Wide Web servers. This powerful combination of a comprehensive web server and full-featured relational database enables flexible database queries and forms-based access to a web server by web browsers.

NetLink/4D communicates with WebSTAR using the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) in the form of Apple Events. NetLink/4D performs all the Apple Event handling and provides a simple, intuitive command set for sending replies back to WebSTAR in the form of HTML scripts and images in GIF and JPEG formats. The combination of NetLink/4D and WebSTAR is fast. Search times of a test 1500 record database are consistently less than a second.

NetLink/4D for 4D manages multiple simultaneous communications between WebSTAR and 4th Dimension using 4D’s multi-tasking architecture. This allows multiple web clients like Netscape to simultaneously perform database actions such as form-based queries and data entry.

Foresight Technology, Inc. 4100 International Plaza, Suite 538, Fort Worth, Texas, 76109. Phone: (800) 701-9393, (817) 731-4444; fax: (817) 731-9304; email sales@fsti.com or info@fsti.com; web: http://www.fsti.com/

MachTen Unix, Faster, Smaller, Native!

MachTen Power Unix Release 4.0, accelerated for Power PC, is the only UNIX available for Power Macintosh and clones. The package contains a complete software development environment including C, C++, source level debugger, and Fortran, all generating Power PC code. Also included is a high performance X server and an X11R5 client development environment with a Motif toolkit.

The tools can generate Power PC Executable Format (PEF) files that can integrate directly with other Macintosh development tools. Thus, it’s possible to develop UNIX applications with Macintosh interfaces.

Improvements to the kernel have resulted in a smaller runtime RAM footprint and faster execution. The loader supports dynamic linking to shared libraries, (which reduces RAM usage by around 50%) and memory mapped file access (which improves efficiency by deferring the allocation of instruction memory until reference to a specific ‘page’ is made).

MachTen continues to improve their internet support as well, providing httpd, BBEdit 3.5, domain name service, mail software, and other networking tools that come with BSD 4.4. [These tools are handy to have if you are debugging an IP network. -jk]

Tenon Intersystems, phone: (805) 963-6983 ; fax: (805) 962-8202 ; email: info@tenon.com ; web: http://www.tenon.com

Motorola Announces Compiler Update
for the Power Macintosh

Motorola RISC Software announced feature enhancements to Motorola’s C/C++ and FORTRAN Software Development Kits (SDK) for the Power Macintosh. The update to Motorola’s C/C++ and FORTRAN SDKs will be available in the early fourth quarter of 1995.

As a new addition to Motorola’s software development tools - and beginning with this update to the C/C++ and FORTRAN SDKs, Power Macintosh Edition - Motorola announced a bundling agreement with Kuck and Associates, Inc. (KAI) to include KAP tools with SDKs for the Power Macintosh, Windows NT and UNIX platforms.

With over a decade of success in providing optimization and parallelization for the supercomputer and workstation markets, Kuck and Associates’ Preprocessor (KAP) provides software that, when used in conjunction with an optimizing compiler, can provide significant performance increases for a broad class of FORTRAN and C programs.

Motorola, web: http://www.mot.com/PowerPC/

StuffIt Expander for Windows (Weenies)

There’s now a Stuffit Expander for Windows, so all your friends who simply refuse to use the superior operating system can open StuffIt files. Just remind them which machine ran this cool software first. Freeware from Aladdin Systems, ftp://ftp.aladdinsys.com/

Consume Your Copious Free Time
More Efficiently with URL Organizers

Recently, interesting tools to manage your URLs have been unleashed: GrabNet and ClayBasket are noted in the URLs column. A similar program, named CyberFinder, was created at MacHack this August. CyberFinder allows you to save URLs as Finder items, and then open then with a double-click; this brings to mind the CyberDog demo at WWDC that had everyone wide-eyed and smiling. Cool!

Available at an Info-Mac archive site. CD ROM publisher Pacific Hi-Tech sells an Info-Mac CD ROM and runs an archive mirror at ftp://ftp.pht.com