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If any of you happen to run Windows 95 or Windows NT along with OS/2,
you may have had the opportunity to play around with Truespectra's
Photo>Graphics beta for the Windows platforms.  If you have, you've
probably noticed that the User Interface is radically different from the
OS/2 version -- more streamlined, more intuitive, a bit more polished.

Don't worry -- Truespectra is not abandoning the OS/2 market, and we
will be getting a similar GUI.  According to Terry Hamilton, the program
manager of the Photo>Graphics development effort for the OS/2 and
Windows platforms, NT and Windows 95 got the new UI first by chance --
the development of the beta just happened to be at the right stage at
the right time.  By the release of version 3.0, Terry says, the OS/2 and
Windows versions should have the same UI.

In fact, every platform Truespectra supports will have this UI because
they are going to start programming it in Java.  Basically,
Photo>Graphics will be a hybrid program -- the ColorWave rendering
engine will be programmed in ANSI C (which is fast and fairly easy to
port) so the processor-intensive functions can run in native code, and
the UI will be programmed in Java so it can be ported with ease from one
platform to another.

Apparently Truespectra has been testing this theory on different
platforms.  A single developer was able to port the ColorWave engine to
Linux in 9 hours.  Even if it took an hour to wrinkle out the slight
differences in the Java engine on the Linux platform from the Java
engine on the OS/2 platform, that's still an entirely new market created
in a 10-hour workday.

For those of you who read my debate with Dirk Terrell, it looks like I'm
going to have to swallow my pride and admit that Java is going to be
pretty important to developers a lot sooner than I thought.

Chris Wright

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Chris Wright (wrightc@dtcweb.com)

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