No Longer For Sale - Now Free!

The OPEN LOOK and XView Documentation and Source Code CD was a large but affordable collection of mostly-free software, focussing primarily on OPEN LOOK, XView, and the NeWS Window System. OPEN LOOK is a very good specification for a Graphical User Interface, or GUI, primarily popular on the UNIX and Linux operating systems. XView is an easy-to-use toolkit for writing OPEN LOOK programs under the X Window System. NeWS was Sun's Network extensible Window System, a faster, lighter-weight window system alternative to X. NeWS was designed by James Gosling, who later designed the Java Programming Language. Under the Common Open Systems Environment process, OPEN LOOK is being "phased out", though it is still actively used, both inside Sun and by their customers, and in the Linux and other free-software communities. And under competition from Display PostScript, the NeWS window system has been abandoned by Sun. We simply chose to provide a single source for all publicly-available material related to them.

Many people think that OPEN LOOK is a better GUI than (say) Motif. That's purely a matter of opinion, of course, but it's ours, and many share it. There are some good human-factors reasons why OPEN LOOK is more "intuitive." As well, the XView toolkit was the first free-software commercial-quality toolkit for developing full-scale X applications, and is widely used in the Sun and Linux communities (this is not to disparage Tk, QT or GTK, which came later).

My biggest complaint about many XView programs - and it's no less true of some programs I've since had to work on in Motif, Qt, Gtk and Java - is that developers don't understand how to write good GUI code using the Model/View/Controller pattern. Please, if you're writing GUI code, do read up on "MVC", and use it. MVC is the definitive way of writing maintainable GUI code. Here are some notes and sample code that I wrote on MVC (in Java).

Where to get it now?

The declining use of XView lead to a drop in sales of the CD. Thus, I have open sourced it! Here's where to get the material:

• Book - Volume 3, OPEN LOOK
• Book - Volume 7A, XVIEW
• Book - Volume 7B, XVIEW
• The X Window System Source Code
• The XFree86 fork source code
• The XView Source Code
• The MGR Window System Source Code, originally by Steve Uhler of Bellcore.
• XView Programs There programs were included on the CD; I am working to make copies of all of them available.

  src/xview:     facman         olxvman        sidtool        xvmines-1.0
  Ftptool4.6b4   faxtool1.2     owrolo         sweeper-1.1    xvnews-2.3
  NADagent       fsptool-1.6.1  painter        textedit       xvnotice
  apex-1.1       genix_ui       pan3.0         timekeeper     xvokscript
  catcher        gil2bil        phonetool      tree           xvset_0.80
  clock          graphed        privtool-0.83  videoteXt-0.5  xvtdl-5.0
  cmdtool        guide          props          workman        xwb
  coffee         index.html     props_ui       xcalentool     yamailt_ui
  disktool-2.0   mahjongg2.1    rasview        xrolo-2.06     xplan
  dstool         moxftp-2.2     robotx0.48     xvgr-2.09
  examples       ol-wais        scantool       xvirtual
  

• Finally, you can download the complete CD-ROM image file olcd-1.2.iso (about 250 MB).