BETA SITE INFORMATION --------------------- ************************************************************* CONTACT NAME: Don Hopkins COMPANY NAME: University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab ADDRESS: Don Hopkins University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab College Park, MD 20742 PHONE: (301) 454-1517 (301) 474-8027 E-MAIL ADDRESS: don@brillig.umd.edu SUN SALES REP: Doug Michel SUN TECH REP: Joel McClung ************************************************************** GENERAL ------- What Sun support contracts do you currently have? (hardware, software, unbundled software) Sun hardware support. NeWS 1.1 source license. Sun Unix source license. NFS source license. What release of SunOS (UNIX) are you running? When will you be upgraded to Release 4.0? SunOS 3.2 is running on the 3/50 we are presently using for NeWS development. We hope to install 4.0 on our Sun 4/110C, when we get it. Do you need 1/2 inch or 1/4 inch tapes? Or can either size be used? 1/4 inch tapes are most convenient, but we can read either size. Do you have the hardware you plan to run on? If so, list machine type and serial numbers. Not yet. We are awaiting the delivery of a Sun 4/110C. We are presently using a Sun 3/50, serial number 501116209753 (according to the plastic tag on the back.) How long have you had your equipment? We've had the 3/50 for around 2 years. What is your hardware configuration? (Include in the configuration any disks you have and network configuration information.) The 3/50 has a 41 Meg disk drive (according to df), and a 1/4 inch tape. The department has a network of about 60 Sun-2 and Sun-3 systems. There are two large Sun file servers available on the network, each with two 349 Meg drives. The 4/110C we'll be getting will have 8 Meg RAM, a 327 Meg disk, a floating point unit, and a 1/4 inch tape drive. Do you have a UUCP connection to Sun? We have an Internet connection. Have you been involved in the Beta test of previous Sun products? Which ones and when? We were an unofficial beta test site for NeWS 1.1. (Smita Deshpande sent it to us for testing, without support.) WINDOW SYSTEMS -------------- Do you have the X11 Release 2 tape from MIT? Are you currently using it? We have gotten the X11R2 distribution from MIT, but we're currently doing our development with NeWS 1.1. We've been using X10 since before the release of X10R4. I used it to implement pie menus, as an extension to the X10 "uwm" window manager. What modules/tools included on that tape are you currently using? Please provide a detailed list. We're not presently using X11R2. We are planning to port HyperTIES to X11, so we will be using the X-Toolkit. Which of these (unenhanced) tools should Sun include in the X11/NeWS release? Why? We need the X Toolkit, for HyperTIES. We could really use a good graphics editor, to assist in the authoring of HyperTIES databases. In your opinion, which is more important, and why?: - supporting and enhancing these tools - adding functionality to the existing SunView, X11/NeWS products and future products They're both very important, but I think that there are a lot of advanced features of X11/NeWS that existing applications could be made to take advantage of, that would make life much easier for program developers and users. Please add suggestions for functionality enhancements which you might consider more important. A graphical PostScript debugger and object browser. An object oriented PostScript graphics editor. A WYSIWYG control panel editor, using a toolkit based on persistant objects whose descriptions can be written out to text files. What window systems or user-interface toolkits do you have recent experience with? Please check all that apply. ____ X11 ____ Xt (X toolkit) ____ Andrew __X_ NeWS __X_ SunView 1 __X_ SunWindows __X_ other (please specify) X10, MacIntosh, Xerox Viewpoint Will your programs use: __X_ X11 protocol __X_ NeWS protocol ____ SunView 2 How many lines of code will be involved in your testing during the Beta period: __?_ Xlib C ____ CLX (Common Lisp X interface) __?_ Xt (X toolkit) 9186 NeWS ____ SunView What applications will be part of your testing? Please give a detailed explanation why your applications will provide a particularly good testing ground for X11, NeWS or SunView 2. We will be testing the NeWS port of HyperTIES, The Interactive Encyclopedia System, which presently runs under NeWS 1.1. We also plan on using the X11/NeWS server in our port of HyperTIES to X11. HyperTIES is a hypermedia browser, with "touchable" (mouse sensitive) text and graphical images, used to bring up definitions, follow links around the database, and issue commands, by pointing and clicking at touchable regions with the mouse. NeWS HyperTIES implements several interesting styles of graphical highlighting, such as outlined and inverted shapes, animation, and arbitrarily shaped popup regions (i.e. popup "cookies" that are cut out of an image, and offset and magnified by some amount, leaving behind a shadow, giving a three-dimensional appearance.) NeWS HyperTIES also supports other types of mouse sensitive items such as control buttons, pop-up menus, sliders, scroll bars, text fields, and scrollable text canvases. It makes extensive use of the NeWS object oriented programming system, implementing the touchables as subclasses of LiteItem, so it is easy to add in new classes of objects. To implement advanced features for X11, such as popups and PostScript pictures, NeWS will be used to render scaled and clipped images from their PostScript descriptions, and write out raster files and bitmap masks for X11 to use. I will port the NeWS 1.1 pie menu implementation to the X11/NeWS server, and use the system in my continuing research into pie menu techniques and applications. I will port the NeWS 1.1 pie menu window manager, a subclass of LiteWindow, to X11/NeWS. It will be a good test of how a unified window manager written in NeWS's object oriented PostScript can provide an advanced user interface to both X11 and NeWS windows. We plan on implementing pie menus for the X-Toolkit, once we have a richer working environment than plain vanilla X11. It will be interesting to be able to compare the appearance and performance of square X-Toolkit pie menus, linked into a client, with round NeWS pie menus, running in the server, side by side on the same screen. Time permitting, I would like to experiment with the implementation of X-Toolkit widgets which are really interfaces to NeWS Items, implemented in object oriented PostScript running in the server. This would make it possible to modularly replace pieces of the toolkit without relinking X-Toolkit clients, making prototyping, development, and customization of user interfaces much easier. How many resources will be dedicated to convert/run this code during the Beta Test cycle? We presently have a Sun 3/50. We will be getting a Sun 4/110C, and a Sun 3/60. We have access to other Computer Science Department resources as well. How many developers will be involved in the Beta Test cycle? What are their areas of expertise? At least 5 people will be working on the Sun implementation of HyperTIES. They have experience with NeWS, X, SunView, C, PostScript, Forth, Lisp, Unix, networking, Emacs, hypermedia authoring and browsing systems, psychology, human computer interaction, and user interface design and evaluation. How many users will be involved in the Beta Test cycle? The 5 developers, as well as other members of the Human Computer Interaction Lab and the Computer Science Department. Will you also be doing ongoing development during the Beta Test cycle? What applications are you working on? (Please be specific.) As described above, we will be continuing our development of NeWS HyperTIES, and starting work on the port of HyperTIES to X11. We plan on developing authoring tools such as a PostScript path editor (for tracing out popup cookies over images), and a HyperTIES storyboard editing tool, using Emacs. I will also be experimenting with pie menus and window managers. Does your development schedule coincide with the X11/NeWS and SunView 2 Beta schedule? Yes. REQUIREMENTS ------------ List all requirements and dates they will be met. Requirement Date Met ----------- -------- 1. Running SunOS Release 4.0 Whenever the Sun-4 is delivered on Sun-3 or Sun-4 2. Have 8 MB of memory Whenever the Sun-4 is delivered 3. Have 25 - 40 MB of disk space Present 4. UUCP connection to Sun Present 5. Network configuration Present