Icons For Macintosh Unix

Caption

What is the appearance of the  InterfaceR work video

Description

User Interface A / Ux

Main Article Text

Apple is putting a lot of emphasis on the importance of connectivity and does everything to make it easy to connect their systems with the edp facilities that companies have installed, favoring in particular openings, in the direction of IBM, Digital Unix and the world of UNIX in general. However, in this commendable effort to meet the demands from many quarters that this integration calls for, the company has recently churned out some advanced and complex products that are missing the proverbial friendly interface. This is the case of A Ux, the UNIX operating system for Macintosh II that saw the light in February. Equipped with the proper functions of the Unix System V, of AT & T and certain prerogatives of Bsd 4.2 (the UNIX system of the Berkeley Californian universities), A Ux puts the Macintosh user in front of the classic UNIX interface, which can be considered one of the most difficult of all. This could be acceptable for all of the software developers who are accustomed to dealing with screens full of abstruse symbols; meanwhile this portends badly for those whose who need, and because they have become accustomed to the icons and the Finder menu (the operating system of the Mac). To remedy this problem, the software company List has, planned to put in place a special user interface for Ux. The product is called InterfaceR which models itself after the structure of MacNix and Makeasy, two products that List has for some time proposed to manage by means of icons the emulation on a Macintosh of a Unix terminal and a Digital VMS terminal. InterfaceR governs the standard of the menus and icons and all the main functions of a workstation, such as window management, the manipulation of files and directories launch applications running under A Ux, email administration and interface with the printer. Technically InterfaceR is a shell, or a command interpreter that acts as a buffer between the Finder environment and operating system A Ux. Each of the objects that are generated in UNIX is encoded and identified by means of a specific icon. There are programs that can be launched in the rather expressive shape of a rocket while the documents produced with word processing and electronics e-mail messages have the classic look of a typed sheet, which is already familiar to those who habitually use the Macintosh station as a word processor. The interface allows you to define particular command sequences and to assign the activation to one of the entries in the drop-down menu that will open at the top of the screen.

List (Piazza Mazzini 6, 56100 Pisa, tel. 050 44023) is a company where Apple Computer is a shareholder. Treating the product as one developed in the family, InterfaceR was proposed to Apple because it can at the international level encode, the standard interface to A Ux for the whole world. The engineers, however, at Cupertino, while showing interest, have not yet said anything regarding InterfaceR.

InterfaceR costs 360,000 lire for each workstation on which it is installed and provides comprehensive ability to multitask and manage multiple windows. Outside of Italy the package will be priced at $ 295.

Roberto Mazzoni