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Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.announce From: Conrad_Geiger@NeXT.COM (Conrad Geiger) Subject: PRESS RELEASE: Object Horizons, Ltd. Announces Performance for NEXTSTEP Organization: Next Announcements Approved: sanguish@digifix.com News For more information, please contact: Chris Traynor Object Horizons, Ltd 167 Milk St., Ste.#212 Boston, MA 02109-4315 Email: info@nightspore.ohi.com Object Horizons, Ltd. Announces Performance for NEXTSTEP Boston, MA: June 25, 1993 - Object Horizons today announced Performance, a breakthrough information theatre application for NEXTSTEP computers. Performance offers NEXTSTEP users and developers the ability to create highly customized standalone and networked environments utilizing animated agents capable of storing and manipulating distributed information. Object Horizons also announced today the full developer extension to the application, Performance Professional, and that both the user and professional packages would ship "multi-architecture" for users of one or both Motorola and Intel-based machines running NEXTSTEP. The developer extension includes source code and samples that demonstrate Performance's revolutionary dynamic loading capability for NEXTSTEP custom application developers interested in creating complex, animated, distributed front-ends to personal or enterprise-wide client/server information. "We take the idea of information theatre seriously," said Chris Traynor, Object Horizons' President, "and we were able to develop an application under NEXTSTEP that removes that idea from academia and places it squarely in the mainstream of desktop computing today. We believe that with Performance we have launched an entirely new software category." Performance features extensive and innovative use of NEXTSTEP's distributed objects protocol to enable instantaneous distribution of information among users on networks running NEXTSTEP, as well as a highly advanced and user extensible communication scheme called connections. "With Performance's connections mechanism and directors feature, we have pioneered an area we call 'propagated, distributed functionality'," said Mr. Traynor. "Put simply, this allows users to create distributed servers capable of dynamically adding, deleting and manipulating the functionality of clients over a network, and in fact create servers capable of migrating through networks!" Users of Performance can create networkable performance documents which contain sets of animated actors that can perform numerous activities including sharing data with remote users, holding and launching applications and documents, providing tactile and visual feedback to user events both remote and local, manipulating stored data, automating electronic mail and communicating action messages with one another. Developers can utilize the dynamically loadable directors interface included with the professional extension to create highly distributed and dynamic front-ends to custom applications from databases and spreadsheets to advanced telecommunications, financial and reactive agent systems. "We're big fans of programs like [the Macintosh's] After Dark, programs that give users the ability to personalize their environments, except we feel that those programs are not nearly customizeable enough and don't do any work," said Mr. Traynor. "People want the ability to make their computing environments their own, make them more responsive, personal and understandable; they don't want to be stuck with some programmer's idea of what they should see, if they can even make sense of it! We believe the relation between the visual representation of information and the actual information needs to be made the province of the user alone. We set out to marry strong user-customization with the ability to manipulate and distribute data in an environment that would offer great tactile and audio-visual feedback, and we went with NeXTSTEP because we felt it was the only software system available right now that would allow us to meet that challenge,". About Performance Performance's extensive capabilities include: - Advanced distributed objects implementation including the instantaneous distribution of files and folders to remote users. - Fault-tolerant client and server actors that are transparently able to "find" one another after remote logouts, system failures etc. - Dynamic user creation of agent events and actions. - Optimized Display Postscript routines for incredibly fast animation. - Sophisticated event-handling capabilities that allow users to interact with performance documents without activating the application. - Actors in Performance can be composed of both standard encapsulated PostScript (EPS) and tagged image file format (TIFF) files, from single images to hundreds of frames. - Complete drag and drop implementation. - Thorough on-line documentation and help system. - Fully customizeable toolbars. - Tiling, centering and scaling of background images and screen locking and saving. - Developers and advanced users (such as those creating large corporate executive information tools or researching complex computer-human interfaces) wishing to extend Performance while leveraging it's strong in-built capabilities can utilize the developer extension to quickly create highly sophisticated dynamically loadable directors in Objective C. Directors can easily add custom actions and events to Performance that actors can respond to for incredibly rich, intricate and interesting results. Performance will be available third quarter '93. The user package has a suggested retail price of $295 and Performance Professional a price of $495. Performance will be available directly from Paget, from your local NeXT dealer or from NeXTConnection. Users who buy the Performance beta, to be released in August, will be eligible to receive Performance 1.0 for no charge. Object Horizons plans to announce developer, educational and volume discount pricing shortly. Object Horizons, Ltd. of Boston, MA, founded in 1988, is developing a full suite of advanced information theatre and agent-based productivity applications for NeXTSTEP computers. Performance and Performance Professional are trademarks of Object Horizons, Ltd. NEXTSTEP is a trademark of NeXT, Inc. All other brand names mentioned are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
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