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Re: NeXTstep support?



>>>>> "Joshua" == Joshua W Burton <burton@het.brown.edu> writes:

    Joshua> Dear Mat, I realize that you are fairly swamped with email
    Joshua> (heavens, *I'm* swamped with your email, and I don't even
    Joshua> want 99% of it), but I wanted to bring an obscure OS
    Joshua> called NeXTstep (or perhaps NEXTSTEP) to your attention.
    Joshua> The installed base is small, but I am told that it permits
    Joshua> very rapid development of insanely great apps...like
    Joshua> Executor, for example.  A new attempt to maintain support
    Joshua> for your oldest customers, as Executor moves forward
    Joshua> toward 2.0, would be very reassuring for those of us who
    Joshua> are still around....

I'm certainly a big NEXTSTEP fan.  I was the NeXT Campus Consultant at
MIT, and I've personally owned two black NEXTSTEP boxes and run NSFIP
on my Dell.  In college I wrote a large scanning/database/publishing
NEXTSTEP app that would have taken at least five times as long to
write on other platforms.

ARDI plans to continue supporting our NEXTSTEP customers.  They have
been an invaluable source of bug reports and suggestions over the
years.  Furthermore, the general ease of writing NEXTSTEP programs
combined with the portability of our code lets us support NEXTSTEP
(68k & x86) without much extra effort.

The only reason we haven't released a NEXTSTEP version recently is
because some internal changes in how we handle graphics have rendered
us temporarily unable to do so.  Since we need to revamp NEXTSTEP
graphics support anyway, we've recently been trying to track down the
information we need to add Interceptor library support.  Once we get
that information, we intend to get our NEXTSTEP port running again.
Once it's back in working order, we should be able to release each new
version of Executor for NEXTSTEP, Linux, and DOS simultaneously.

-Mat


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