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WAMADA Notes

Leslie Jeffries

SEPTEMBER- UserLand IAC Toolkit & Frontier

Dave Buell of Advanced Laser Graphics gave the group an overview of Dave Winer's Frontier at the WAMADA meeting in September. Frontier allows end users to script applications on the Macintosh that support Apple Events. Frontier also comes with predefined verbs that act as the primitives for developing further scripts.

After Dave gave us a feel for what Frontier is capable of, he presented the IAC Toolkit. At Advanced Laser Graphics, Dave is making an effort to integrate the IAC Toolkit with MacApp 3. He's made some progress; however, there are apparently some problems in completing the integration of the IAC Toolkit with the existing MacApp 3 framework.

OCTOBER-Apple Events, The Object Model & MacApp

Our celebrity speaker for October was Eric Berdahl, who was in Washington to demo his project at a trade show. Berdahl began his presentation with an introduction to AppleEvents, the AppleEvent Object Model, and the Object Support Library. The terminology involved in all this was kind of overwhelming for the group, but you could see the light bulb turn on over the heads of some members. I think it's comparable to the feeling when you "get" object programming: you're beginning to understand it, then you get really confused-but then the fog clears, and BAMM! you really understand the entire concept. After that you can't think any other way.

Once we were all speaking the same language, Berdahl walked us through his modifications to MacApp 3.0b2PQR to support the Object Model and the Object Support Library. There was a lot of interest as to whether Berdahl's modifications will be similar to the final support available in a (yet unspecified) future release of MacApp that will support these concepts. Berdahl was infinitely patient with our questions; we left the meeting with a much better understanding of AppleEvents and MacApp.

Attending Berdahl's talk made us the guinea pigs for his session at the 1992 MADA Conference. I strongly recommend that you attend his session in Orlando.

IcePick Demo

Since Eric had a copy of IcePick on his SyQuest cartridge, we coaxed him into a quick demonstration. IcePick is a tool under development by Chris Arbogast that allows you to create your views and actually try them out. There are some wonderful features in IcePick: it automatically creates Rez source for your views, and can display your view hierarchy in an outline format.

Upcoming in November-Dinker

Kurt Schmucker will be at WAMADA in November to discuss the Dynamic Linker project (Dinker) under development at Apple's ATG East office in Columbia, Maryland. You won't want to miss this one!

Since June, the Washington D.C. area MADA group makes its home at McDonnell Douglas in Tyson's Corner, Virginia. Thanks to Mark Gerl and Yvon Perrault, this new meeting location is available every third Wednesday of the month from 7:15 p.m. until we decide to close. If you need a map, send a message to me at JEFFRIES.L on AppleLink or call (301) 340-5126 during business hours (EST)