Lotus Development Corp has announced an Open Look interface for its 1-2-3-for-Unix product running on Sparc machines. The release is the first graphical version to become available on Sun Microsystems Inc machines – a toggle switch allows for instant recourse to the character-based version. Lotus went to Alex Technologies Ltd of West London for the implementation, which uses the Alex language to interpret terminal output from the application and turn it into a graphical interface, with no changes to the application software needed. Alex supports both Open Look and Motif toolkits. Based on version 1.1, the product supports X Window, integrates the Lotus C Add-in Toolkit, has a bundled Sybase SQL Server DataLens Driver and supports Lotus Real-time. It’s available in 90 days, and the UK launch is at the Open Systems show. Alex says it has another major US software house waiting in the wings to announce an Alex-based Open Look product.
