AppMaker Improves Support for Apple's Appearance Manager;
Announces Mac OS X "Carbon" Plans.
Grantham, NH - Bowers Development announced that it is now shipping
AppMaker CD #10. It is in the mail to all current subscribers, domestic and
international.
AppMaker's view editor and simulator more fully support Apple's Appearance
Manager. It supports more kinds of controls and more options, such as bevel
buttons with icon and text and menus; left and right icon buttons; clock
controls; password fields; group boxes with the 3D look and with checkbox
or popup titles; and Apple's Tab Panels.
"Apple's Appearance Manager is good stuff," said Spec Bowers, President of
Bowers Development. "It not only makes your program look better, it also
makes the code simpler. Things like Tab Panels are now easy to do."
AppMaker has always supported more than the standard controls by providing
custom CDEFs for picture controls, 3D controls, various kinds of sliders,
and others. "From now on we will focus primarily on Appearance controls.
These are already backwards compatible to System 7.1 and Apple promises
forwards compatibility to Mac OS X," noted Bowers.
Beyond building the user interface, AppMaker also helps users define the
data engine part of their programs. Users can define data items and connect
them to user interface items. AppMaker #10 supports more data types and
also lets users define function members. AppMaker generates accessor
functions for the data and generates code to Get and Set data values.
For PowerPlant, AppMaker generates the compatibility classes rather than
the old GA classes. PowerPlant at runtime decides whether to use the new
Appearance controls or the old GA classes. For C++, AppMaker now generates
dialogs as classes rather than procedural code. This provides the same
UI-Data interaction formerly available only with windows. It also
simplifies some of the library code for handling dialogs.
The AppMaker-generated code is already more than 90% Carbon-compatible.
Bowers plans to support Navigation Services in a release later this year.
The few remaining incompatibilities will be updated as soon as Apple
release new APIs.
About AppMaker
AppMaker is a programming tool that makes it faster and easier to develop
the user interface for a Macintosh application. Users point and click to
design menus, windows, dialogs, and their contents including icon buttons,
sliders, progress bars, group boxes, and tab panels. Then AppMaker
generates expert-quality source code and resources to implement their
design.
Pricing and Availability
AppMaker CD #10 is available now from DevDepot,
http://www.devdepot.com/, or from Bowers Development,
http://members.aol.com/bowersdev/. The $199 price includes a one-year
subscription.
About Bowers Development
Bowers Development was formed in 1989 to develop programmer productivity tools.
Press contact:
Spec Bowers
Bowers Development
603-863-0945, fax 863-3857
bowersdev@aol.com
http://members.aol.com/bowersdev/
