Is this newsgroup alive?
Thomas Lee
Just a quick test to see if this group is active in any way - looks like
there have been few on-topic posts for a long time.
Thomas
--
Thomas Lee
(t...@psp.co.uk)
Thomas Lee
writes
><knock knock> Anyone home??
>
>Just a quick test to see if this group is active in any way - looks
>like there have been few on-topic posts for a long time.
>
>Thomas
Is anyone actually even reading this group?
--
Thomas Lee
(t...@psp.co.uk)
jk
Suprisingly, yes! Although only because I recently took an interest in
InterViews and thought I'd have a look through the news archive to try and
gain a better understanding of things. How about you - why are you in this
neck of the woods!? :-)
Joe Felsenstein
>Thomas Lee wrote:
>> In message <a8$e1kUV8...@mail.psp.co.uk>, Thomas Lee <t...@psp.co.uk>
>> writes
>>><knock knock> Anyone home??
>>>
>>>Just a quick test to see if this group is active in any way - looks
>>>like there have been few on-topic posts for a long time.
>>
>
>Suprisingly, yes! Although only because I recently took an interest in
>InterViews and thought I'd have a look through the news archive to try and
>gain a better understanding of things. How about you - why are you in this
>neck of the woods!? :-)
This newsgroup is, generally speak "dead as a doornail". Almost all of the very
few posts on it in recent months have been either spams, or people who want to
talk about interviewing people, or people who want to talk about Microsoft
Windows. They haven't a clue about InterViews.
I keep it on my newsgroups list in case someone like you two comes along
and actually says something about InterViews. I am an avid user of the
Idraw graphics editor (I used it for the figures in a long book I wrote,
for figures in slides of courses I teach, and for editing graphs of data
that I can produce using the Gnu Plotutils "graph" function.
I had a programmer who worked for me, Mike Palczewski, create an RPM of the
Ivtools package because one was needed. I am very grateful to Scott Johnston
of Vectaport, Inc. for keeping distribution of InterViews alive in his
Ivtools package and for creating programs like Drawtool which is a good
alternative to the InterViews Idraw (it's really an extension of it).
All that having been said, I have almost never been able to persuade anyone
else to use Idraw or Drawtool instead of other vector graphics editors such
as Xfig or Adobe Illustrator. I find Illustrator too cumbersome and Xfig
harder to use than Idraw.
----
Joe Felsenstein joe (at) removethispart.gs.washington.edu
Department of Genome Sciences and Department of Biology,
University of Washington, Box 355065, Seattle, WA 98195-5065 USA
jk
> In article <DWD5j.23611$j7.4...@news.indigo.ie>, jk <j...@iol.ie> wrote:
>>Thomas Lee wrote:
>>> In message <a8$e1kUV8...@mail.psp.co.uk>, Thomas Lee <t...@psp.co.uk>
>>> writes
>>>><knock knock> Anyone home??
>>>>
>>>>Just a quick test to see if this group is active in any way - looks
>>>>like there have been few on-topic posts for a long time.
>>>
>>> Is anyone actually even reading this group?
>>
>>Suprisingly, yes! Although only because I recently took an interest in
>>InterViews and thought I'd have a look through the news archive to try and
>>gain a better understanding of things. How about you - why are you in this
>>neck of the woods!? :-)
>
> This newsgroup is, generally speak "dead as a doornail". Almost all of
> the very few posts on it in recent months have been either spams, or
> people who want to talk about interviewing people, or people who want to
> talk about Microsoft
> Windows. They haven't a clue about InterViews.
>
> I keep it on my newsgroups list in case someone like you two comes along
> and actually says something about InterViews. I am an avid user of the
> Idraw graphics editor
[snip]
> All that having been said, I have almost never been able to persuade
> anyone else to use Idraw or Drawtool instead of other vector graphics
> editors such
> as Xfig or Adobe Illustrator. I find Illustrator too cumbersome and Xfig
> harder to use than Idraw.
I'm interested in GUI toolkits and suchlike, and InterViews ('IV') is
obviously one of the classic early C++ toolkits worth taking a look at,
especially with the introduction of 'glyphs' in version 3.
It's a shame in some ways that IV branched into the 'distributed graphics'
world with 'Fresco', but it was, after all, more of an academic project
than a product, so it's not really suprising.
Perhaps, if enough people are interested, we might pick up the code again,
dust it off, 'modernize' it slightly where needed and, basically, start the
project going again! Is there anyone else out there lurking in the shadows
of this newsgroup?
Joe Felsenstein
There is a Sourceforge group for Ivtools, where Scott Johnston and
others have not only developed drawing applications on top of IV, but
they have fixed some bugs too, I believe. So I am not sure the project
needs to be restarted. They have it working on Unix/Linux and Mac OS X.
Is there any reason not to just join in there? (I do not have either
the time or the knowledge to do much with this but would be happy to
know of any developments).
Scott Johnston
Felsenstein) wrote:
> There is a Sourceforge group for Ivtools, where Scott Johnston and
> others have not only developed drawing applications on top of IV, but
> they have fixed some bugs too, I believe. So I am not sure the project
> needs to be restarted. They have it working on Unix/Linux and Mac OS X.
> Is there any reason not to just join in there? (I do not have either
> the time or the knowledge to do much with this but would be happy to
> know of any developments).
>
> ----
> Joe Felsenstein joe (at) removethispart.gs.washington.edu
> Department of Genome Sciences and Department of Biology,
> University of Washington, Box 355065, Seattle, WA 98195-5065 USA
Joe,
Thanks for watching this newsgroup and mentioning ivtools in the
process (and thanks to Google Alert's). A new version of ivtools will
be out in January 2008 that incorporates changes required by
gcc-4.0.
It will also have many changes to support a new package I'll be
publishing in the near future that is layered on top of ivtools
drawserv. This package, ipl-1.0, will be a visualization and
simulation environment to accompany Karl Fant's book "Computer Science
Reconsidered: The Invocation Model Of Process Expression" (http://
www.theseusresearch.com). It will be made available under a dual-
license similar to Trolltech's Qt toolkit. ivtools will remain under
an MIT/X11 style license.
Scott Johnston
http://www.ivtools.org
jk
> On Dec 19, 10:27 pm, j...@removethispart.gs.washington.edu (Joe
> Felsenstein) wrote:
>
>> There is a Sourceforge group for Ivtools, where Scott Johnston and
>> others have not only developed drawing applications on top of IV, but
>> they have fixed some bugs too, I believe. So I am not sure the project
>> needs to be restarted.
>
> Joe,
>
> Thanks for watching this newsgroup and mentioning ivtools in the
> process (and thanks to Google Alert's). A new version of ivtools will
> be out in January 2008 that incorporates changes required by
> gcc-4.0.
>
Hello Joe & Scott,
Happy New Year to you both!
I was aware of ivtools, but I was under the impression that it was generally
concerned with building new frameworks and such "on-top" of what is
basically still the 3.2a code from many moons ago. (Please feel free to
correct me on that if I'm wrong Scott - I readily admit that I haven't
looked at ivtools.org in any great depth yet! :-)
When I talked about maybe restarting InterViews, I was really talking about
the underlying "GUI" side of things, rather than the drawing frameworks and
such that run "above" that layer. If that doesn't quite make sense to you,
it's just because I'm not explaining things correctly, probably because
those things are still a little fuzzy in my own head at the moment! I'll
try and explain a bit better in a later posting. :-)
Scott, It's great to see that you're keeping InterViews alive with ivtools.
I think your work is a credit to yourself and to the original InterViews
developers (Linton et al.). I hope you'll be able to spare a few minutes to
answer any questions I have when I really get the time to look at the
original IV code and docs, as well as ivtools itself of course.
Out of interest, I was doing a little searching last night and I happened
upon the vrweb project - http://www2.iicm.tugraz.at/vrml95/vrweb.html -
(dormant since 1997ish), who had their own updated version of IV, called
'IICMViews'. Had you come across this project in the past and did it
provide anything useful to you?
Also, at http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/interviews/ I found the
original "source code" for the Dec. 1992 Reference Manual. Some of the
other IV files on this site are dated 1993/4, so perhaps they're someone's
own personal IV updates, or maybe they're from the 3.2a release. I haven't
had time to check yet, but maybe you know off hand.
Anyway, I thought I'd post the URL's in case anyone else doing IV research
sometime might be interested. I intend browsing through the usenet archive
when I get a chance to see if I can locate any old software or other
interesting "stuff". I'll post any results. I'll also try and put together
a brief overview of the whole InterViews "project" which might be of
academic interest to some.
Cheers,
jk
Scott Johnston
> concerned with building new frameworks and such "on-top" of what is
> basically still the 3.2a code from many moons ago. (Please feel free to
> correct me on that if I'm wrong Scott - I readily admit that I haven't
>
> When I talked about maybe restarting InterViews, I was really talking about
> the underlying "GUI" side of things, rather than the drawing frameworks and
> such that run "above" that layer. If that doesn't quite make sense to you,
> it's just because I'm not explaining things correctly, probably because
> those things are still a little fuzzy in my own head at the moment! I'll
> try and explain a bit better in a later posting. :-)
>
I understand. I'd point you to either Java Swing, which incorporates
the design ideas of InterViews lightweight glyphs, or the last
versions of the Fresco tar file before it got picked up by the Berlin
folks. I kept two copies and make them available near the bottom of
this page:
http://www.ivtools.org/pub/src/
With Fresco Linton et.al. were trying to unify and simplify the class
structure of InterViews while at the same time solving distributed
user interface glyphs. The work on distributed user interface seems
to have been overtaken by Web 2.0 technologies. But the cleaner 3d
glyph technology of Fresco is still available in those tar files,
ready to have the distributed part of it stripped away.
> Scott, It's great to see that you're keeping InterViews alive withivtools.
> I think your work is a credit to yourself and to the original InterViews
> developers (Linton et al.). I hope you'll be able to spare a few minutes to
> answer any questions I have when I really get the time to look at the
> original IV code and docs, as well asivtoolsitself of course.
Certainly. Contact me at my regular e-mail, which is my last name at
vectaport.
>
> Out of interest, I was doing a little searching last night and I happened
> upon the vrweb project -http://www2.iicm.tugraz.at/vrml95/vrweb.html-
> (dormant since 1997ish), who had their own updated version of IV, called
> 'IICMViews'. Had you come across this project in the past and did it
> provide anything useful to you?
>
> Also, athttp://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/interviews/I found the
> original "source code" for the Dec. 1992 Reference Manual. Some of the
> other IV files on this site are dated 1993/4, so perhaps they're someone's
> own personal IV updates, or maybe they're from the 3.2a release. I haven't
> had time to check yet, but maybe you know off hand.
I've looked at almost every derivative version of InterViews 3.2 over
the years, and have incorporated any fixes I found useful. None of
them ventured to evolve InterViews as far as I know, just port or fix
as needed. For the most part this is true of ivtools as well, as
evolutions to the mechanisms were layered on top in new class
libraries.
>
> Anyway, I thought I'd post the URL's in case anyone else doing IV research
> sometime might be interested. I intend browsing through the usenet archive
> when I get a chance to see if I can locate any old software or other
> interesting "stuff". I'll post any results. I'll also try and put together
> a brief overview of the whole InterViews "project" which might be of
> academic interest to some.
>
> Cheers,
> jk
That overview would be of interest to me. I hope you find the
information at ivtools.org useful.
Scott Johnston
jk
> On Jan 2, 1:33 pm, jk <j...@iol.ie> wrote:
>>
>> When I talked about maybe restarting InterViews, I was really talking
>> about the underlying "GUI" side of things, rather than the drawing
>> frameworks and such that run "above" that layer. If that doesn't quite
>> make sense to you, it's just because I'm not explaining things correctly,
>> probably because those things are still a little fuzzy in my own head at
>> the moment! I'll try and explain a bit better in a later posting. :-)
>>
>
> I understand. I'd point you to either Java Swing, which incorporates
> the design ideas of InterViews lightweight glyphs,
Not being a Java person, I hadn't realised the connection. Thanks for the
pointer.
> or the last
> versions of the Fresco tar file before it got picked up by the Berlin
> folks. I kept two copies and make them available near the bottom of
> this page:
> http://www.ivtools.org/pub/src/
Excellent, thanks.
> With Fresco Linton et.al. were trying to unify and simplify the class
> structure of InterViews while at the same time solving distributed
> user interface glyphs. The work on distributed user interface seems
> to have been overtaken by Web 2.0 technologies. But the cleaner 3d
> glyph technology of Fresco is still available in those tar files,
> ready to have the distributed part of it stripped away.
I'll certainly look into that.
>> Scott, It's great to see that you're keeping InterViews alive
>> withivtools. I think your work is a credit to yourself and to the
>> original InterViews developers (Linton et al.). I hope you'll be able to
>> spare a few minutes to answer any questions I have when I really get the
>> time to look at the original IV code and docs, as well asivtoolsitself of
>> course.
>
> Certainly. Contact me at my regular e-mail, which is my last name at
> vectaport.
Much appreciated.
>> Out of interest, I was doing a little searching last night and I happened
>> upon the vrweb project -http://www2.iicm.tugraz.at/vrml95/vrweb.html-
>> (dormant since 1997ish), who had their own updated version of IV, called
>> 'IICMViews'. Had you come across this project in the past and did it
>> provide anything useful to you?
>
> I've looked at almost every derivative version of InterViews 3.2 over
> the years, and have incorporated any fixes I found useful. None of
> them ventured to evolve InterViews as far as I know, just port or fix
> as needed. For the most part this is true of ivtools as well, as
> evolutions to the mechanisms were layered on top in new class
> libraries.
If I'd looked a bit closer at the ivtools.org site, I would have seen that
you already knew about vrweb and other such projects. I'll have a better
look at the site before I post again :-)
>> Anyway, I thought I'd post the URL's in case anyone else doing IV
>> research sometime might be interested. I intend browsing through the
>> usenet archive when I get a chance to see if I can locate any old
>> software or other interesting "stuff". I'll post any results. I'll also
>> try and put together a brief overview of the whole InterViews "project"
>> which might be of academic interest to some.
>
> That overview would be of interest to me. I hope you find the
> information at ivtools.org useful.
>
> Scott Johnston
Thanks for your help Scott.
Cheers,
jk