Open Software Foundation Announces OSF/Motif Upgrade

Open Software Foundation Announces OSF/Motif(tm) Upgrade

New Release Features Enhanced Internationalization, Drag-and-drop

April 22, 1992: Cambridge, MA- Open Software Foundation today announced general availability of the 1.2 version of the award winning OSF/Motif graphical user interface. The latest release offers increased compatibility with international standards, PC-style behavior and binary compatibility with OSF/Motif 1.1 applications. New features include drag-and-drop, tear-off menus, toolkit enhancements and new documentation.

"With the Motif 1.2 release, we're addressing the needs of the user community more closely than ever before," said Cathy Betz, business area manager for OSF/Motif technology. "They're calling for PC-like appearance and behavior. And as businesses move into the global market, they must be able to adapt their products to country-specific cultural norms. The Motif software allows developers to be more competitive in the international market of the 1990s."

Text characters, date and time, currency, alphabetical sorting and even certain types of computations vary widely by country. With the latest OSF/Motif release, it becomes much easier to adapt software to a country's cultural conventions. Based on the latest release of the X Consortium's X Window System technology (X11R5), the OSF/Motif 1.2 graphical user interface can access all the information necessary to work within the language a user selects. Multi-byte and wide character support enables users to work with Chinese, Korean, Japanese and other complex character sets. A developer can mix fonts as needed. For instance, a Japanese user can edit and view text that includes ASCII characters, Kanji and phonetic kana characters.

Applications created using OSF/Motif 1.1 software will run with the OSF/Motif 1.2 graphical user interface. OSF recognized the importance of preserving existing programming interfaces so that people who have created applications under OSF/Motif 1.1 can protect their development and financial investment. Compatibility with OSF/Motif 1.1 ensures access to existing applications.

OSF/Motif continues to increase its compatibility with PC-style behavior, shortening the learning curve for users accustomed to working with a PC. The latest release is consistent with Microsoft Windows(tm); Presentation Manager(tm), and IBM's CUA(tm) (Common User Access). An updated style guide reflects OSF/Motif's increased consistency with all three styles, enabling the developer to produce applications with the kind of consistent appearance and behavior end users expect today.

Users need to be able to manipulate information -- whether it's moving an icon from one place to another or copying a sentence between applications. Drag and drop offers an easy way to move objects and exchange data between applications in one simple move, instead of cutting and pasting. This is how it works: using the mouse, a person selects an item on the screen and then drags it to a new location. This can be done within a single application or between unrelated applications. Drag-and-drop is network-transparent, allowing interoperability among applications residing on different host machines on a network.

Tear-off menus allow a user to keep a number of frequently-used menus visible on the screen. Normally, a menu disappears once a selection is made. With the OSF/Motif interface, the menu appears as a perforated paper coupon which the user can tear off and post to another portion of the screen. It remains available until the user closes it.

The C programming language interface has been modified to make it easier for developers working in the object-oriented C++ language to make calls into the OSF/Motif interface.

Since being introduced in 1989, the OSF/Motif software has grown to its current base of more than 1,000 commercially-available applications and 1,500 source licensees around the world. More than 85 vendors ship Motif software. It is available on 145 hardware platforms and 47 different operating systems. OSF/Motif is the winner of prestigious awards; among them Byte Magazine, International Design, VarBusiness and Unix World.

The price of OSF/Motif for a university site license (all campus sites) is $1,000. For others, source code with limited distribution rights is $2,000. Full distribution rights, developers' site licenses and support services are available: prices vary. A
special offer on Motif Validation Test Suite is in effect until June 30, 1992. Detailed information on licensing and price structure is available by phoning OSF Direct Channels at (617)621-7300.

The Open Software Foundation is a not-for-profit research and development organization that seeks to enable hardware and software from different companies to work together. OSF has created a coalition of vendors and users working together to develop the industry's leading technical agenda and the software essential for creating a comprehensive, open systems computing environment. Membership in OSF is open without restriction to any hardware or software vendor, end user company, or academic/research organization. As of this writing, some 350 organizations are members of OSF, working cooperatively to further the development and adoption of open systems. OSF's headquarters are in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with offices in Brussels and Tokyo.

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OSF, the OSF logo, OSF/Motif and Motif are trademarks of Open Software Foundation, Inc.