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Item 5191040 93/06/25 12:51
From: CONRAD_GEIGER@NEXT.COM@INET# Internet Gateway
Subject: Object Horizons, Ltd. Announces Performance for NEXTSTEP
News
For more information, please contact:
Chris Traynor
Object Horizons, Ltd
167 Milk St., Ste.#212
Boston, MA 02109-4315
Email: info@nightspore.ohi.com
Object Horizons, Ltd. Announces Performance for NEXTSTEP
Boston, MA: June 25, 1993 - Object Horizons today announced Performance, a
breakthrough information theatre application for NEXTSTEP computers.
Performance offers NEXTSTEP users and developers the ability to create highly
customized standalone and networked environments utilizing animated agents
capable of storing and manipulating distributed information. Object Horizons
also announced today the full developer extension to the application,
Performance Professional, and that both the user and professional packages
would ship "multi-architecture" for users of one or both Motorola and Intel-
based machines running NEXTSTEP. The developer extension includes source code
and samples that demonstrate Performance's revolutionary dynamic loading
capability for NEXTSTEP custom application developers interested in creating
complex, animated, distributed front-ends to personal or enterprise-wide
client/server information.
"We take the idea of information theatre seriously," said Chris Traynor,
Object Horizons' President, "and we were able to develop an application under
NEXTSTEP that removes that idea from academia and places it squarely in the
mainstream of desktop computing today. We believe that with Performance we
have launched an entirely new software category." Performance features
extensive and innovative use of NEXTSTEP's distributed objects protocol to
enable instantaneous distribution of information among users on networks
running NEXTSTEP, as well as a highly advanced and user extensible
communication scheme called connections.
"With Performance's connections mechanism and directors feature, we have
pioneered an area we call 'propagated, distributed functionality'," said Mr.
Traynor. "Put simply, this allows users to create distributed servers capable
of dynamically adding, deleting and manipulating the functionality of clients
over a network, and in fact create servers capable of migrating through
networks!"
Users of Performance can create networkable performance documents which
contain sets of animated actors that can perform numerous activities including
sharing data with remote users, holding and launching applications and
documents, providing tactile and visual feedback to user events both remote
and local, manipulating stored data, automating electronic mail and
communicating action messages with one another. Developers can utilize the
dynamically loadable directors interface included with the professional
extension to create highly distributed and dynamic front-ends to custom
applications from databases and spreadsheets to advanced telecommunications,
financial and reactive agent systems. "We're big fans of programs like [the
Macintosh's] After Dark, programs that give users the ability to personalize
their environments, except we feel that those programs are not nearly
customizeable enough and don't do any work," said Mr. Traynor. "People want
the ability to make their computing environments their own, make them more
responsive, personal and understandable; they don't want to be stuck with some
programmer's idea of what they should see, if they can even make sense of it!
We believe the relation between the visual representation of information and
the actual information needs to be made the province of the user alone. We
set out to marry strong user-customization with the ability to manipulate and
distribute data in an environment that would offer great tactile and audio-
visual feedback, and we went with NeXTSTEP because we felt it was the only
software system available right now that would allow us to meet that
challenge,".
About Performance
Performance's extensive capabilities include:
- Advanced distributed objects implementation including the
instantaneous distribution of files and folders to remote
users. - Fault-tolerant client and server actors that are
transparently able
to "find" one another after remote logouts, system
failures etc. - Dynamic user creation of agent events and actions. -
Optimized Display Postscript routines for incredibly fast
animation. - Sophisticated event-handling capabilities that allow
users to
interact with performance documents without activating
the application. - Actors in Performance can be composed of both
standard encapsulated
PostScript (EPS) and tagged image file format (TIFF) files,
from single images to hundreds of frames. - Complete drag and drop
implementation. - Thorough on-line documentation and help system. - Fully
customizeable toolbars. - Tiling, centering and scaling of background images
and screen
locking and saving. - Developers and advanced users (such as those
creating large
corporate executive information tools or researching
complex computer-human interfaces) wishing to extend
Performance while leveraging it's strong in-built
capabilities can utilize the developer extension to quickly
create highly sophisticated dynamically loadable directors in
Objective C. Directors can easily add custom actions and
events to Performance that actors can respond to for
incredibly rich, intricate and interesting results.
Performance will be available third quarter '93. The user package has a
suggested retail price of $295 and Performance Professional a price of $495.
Performance will be available directly from Paget, from your local NeXT dealer
or from NeXTConnection. Users who buy the Performance beta, to be released in
August, will be eligible to receive Performance 1.0 for no charge. Object
Horizons plans to announce developer, educational and volume discount pricing
shortly.
Object Horizons, Ltd. of Boston, MA, founded in 1988, is developing a full
suite of advanced information theatre and agent-based productivity
applications for NeXTSTEP computers.
Performance and Performance Professional are trademarks of Object Horizons,
Ltd. NEXTSTEP is a trademark of NeXT, Inc. All other brand names mentioned are
trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
=END=