Meanwhile the future of the Open Software Foundation’s Motif graphical user interface is a subject that’s concerning IXI, as well as some other corners of the independent software vendor community who’s businesses are focused on the emerging de facto industry standard, the Foundation’s major success to date. Although there are moves to define the requirements for a next-generation user environment, UEC II, which will be a highly evolved version of Motif, that won’t be around until 1995, and there are some more immediate issues that need to be addressed, according to IXI. Its main concern is that Motif should evolve from what is now essentially a developer’s tool to become an end-user product. That’s no trivial task given that even the latest X Window X11.5-based release of Motif, 1.2, comes with nine patch releases (as of June). Indeed, reviewing its experiences with Motif in our sister publication, Unix News, UK software quality assurance house Programming Research Ltd, Esher, Surrey concluded that improvements are likely to occur only in the event of a complete re-think and re-write. After prompting from its bigger corporate customers, Programming Research decided to make a commitment to use Motif around 18 months ago. However after exhaustive efforts to produce interfaces using Motif – which it dubs a deranged widget set the company has decided to stop throwing good money after bad and cease using it until it either improves or disappears. As well as cleaning up the whole environment, the main task, as far as IXI is concerned, is to make Motif portable across systems. This is not a task for the faint-hearted, and even coping with different releases, as IXI admits, is problematic. Motif also requires more functionality, more hooks, more object-oriented functions, the firm argues, to enable other software to be plugged in, and to encourage the independent software vendor community to write applications for Motif. Ideally, IXI would like to see the Foundation put together an extended application programming interface that would enable other technologies and applications to be brought in. It’s been talking to the Foundation about just these kinds of things, and would (of course), like to do more than simply participate in such an effort if it could, though the smoke signals from the Foundation read simply message received for the present.
