InterViews is a set of libraries and tools for building graphical applications under X11. It's freely available [1], but it's past its prime. Its intended successor was Fresco (FrescoFramework). Summary of key InterViews features from its FAQ: * Native C++ * Glyphs - lightweight, shareable objects * Sophisticated layout objects * Resolution-independent graphics, printing, overlays * Incremental update, double-buffering * Graphical editing framework * Apps: drawing editor, WYSIWYG document editor, interface builder InterViews has touched many lives, in many ways (most of them good)... * ... architectural ideas ... * ... living with C++ ... * ... human interface ideas ... * ... framework technology ... * ... builder technology ... * ... at least two Ph.D. theses ... * ... mucho consulting ... * ... numerous commercial products ... ------------------------ InterViews is still useful today, especially to a programmer willing to investigate problems generated by their derivations in a debugger. Several interesting things have been built with it [3], and a few significant packages like Target Jr and IvTools [4] are still undergoing development. But as a portion of the InterViews team carried on in their quest to unify structured documents and structured graphics (Fresco [2]), and one member of the team started to write about DesignPatterns extracted from InterViews, the original tar file was no longer maintained or evolved. This represented an opportunity for third parties to come out with derivative works, which Vectaport did, layering frameworks [4] for Motif-look-and-feel, hierarchical documents, large-scale rasters, multi-frame and network editing on top of the original UnidrawFramework. Other parties (like VRweb) incorporated slightly modified copies of InterViews into their own software distributions, much like different Linux distributions do with Unix utilities. This is a process open to all-comers, given the BSD style copyright permission notice, and represents a powerful approach to programmers concerned with access to the source where-ever they might need it (a feature of Fresco [2] as well, by the way. It never went proprietary). -- ScottJohnston ---- CategorySoftwareTool ---- [1] ftp://interviews.stanford.edu/pub/interviews/pub/3.1.tar.Z [2] http://www.iuk.tu-harburg.de/fresco/ ( BrokenLink ) [3] http://www.vectaport.com/ivtools/ivapps.html [4] http://www.vectaport.com/ivtools/index.html [5] http://www.fresco.org/ TheBerlinProject has taken over Fresco (the name and the software)