Iris UI's: Forms, tk, etc.

[Dan Wallach]

I'm curious if anybody can complete this picture for me.  If you do a strings
on one of those SGI programs with all the cute buttons (like vadmin) you
see lots of things like "tkButton", "tkObject", etc.  There are also things
in there like "tkButton.c++".

One might assume that SGI's user interface thing is written in C++ and called
tk.  Is this available externally?

Next, if you look at Forms (the excellent public domain user interface system
by Mark Overmars), you see a suprising similarity between Forms and some of
these SGI programs, although the shadows on the 3-D buttons are different...

Now, Overmars has told me "Almost certainly Silicon Graphics is going to
supply the Forms Library as part of their developers package. This means
some sort of support for the future."

When can I expect to see such a thing from SGI itself?  There weren't any
Forms on our Cypress Alpha 182 compact disk.

Essentially, we're trying to decide what user interface to use on a number
of future projects, here, and Forms would be a favorite, if it were supported
by SGI.  (Nobody wants to mess with supporting Panel-lib any more...)

I assume I'm not the only person curious for the answer, so I'm posting
the question, here.

Curiously yours,

Dan Wallach
dwallach at nas.nasa.gov