Hampton Hill, Middlesex-based Lloyd Savage Ltd was probably best known in the UK as the distributor of the Easel product set but in February it sold Lloyd Savage Graphical Interfaces Ltd to Easel Corp. Now it is re-emerging as the distributor for Moodus, Connecticut-based Gpf Systems Inc which offers an interactive, point and click development tool to design OS/2 graphical user interfaces for Presentation Manager Workplace Shell. The Gpf product has been available for nearly two years in various parts of the world although it has not had any formal distribution in the UK until the Lloyd Savage agreement. Like OS/2, Gpf began life as a 16-bit product but in June was upgraded to a 32-bit product supporting OS/2 2.0. Of the 800 users in the US most are large companies, claims Stefan Kent, director of sales and marketing with Gpf. Gpf 2.0 supports the notebook, spin button, slider, container, value set and the drag and drop capability of Workplace Shell. With the tool you can support 16- or 32-bit C code and the 32-bit code that is generated targets IBM’s 32-bit C compiler, C Set/2. The product is not much help in migrating your graphical interface design from 16-bit to 32-bit OS/2, though the algorithms stay the same if you used IBM’s standard Software Developers Kit. Character-based application migration is possible, however, if the algorithms are written so that the code is modularised. A workstation licence for the tool costs ?795 with no runtime or royalties to pay and Gpf 2.0 requires 4Mb of hard disk and 6Mb of RAM. Eric Robson, managing director of Lloyd Savage, says that Gpf will not take his company into competition with Easel as the former toolset is targeted at the C programmer, whereas Easel appeals to the Cobol developer.
