Newest addition to the growing list of firms offering a way of easing the problem of having to implement an application to a growing number of different graphical user interfaces is Open Software Associates Inc, Sunnyvale, California. Making its show debut at Unix Expo a couple of weeks ago, the firm was showing off OpenUI, software that enables developers to add a graphical front-end on to an application, which will then run – and have the same look and feel – across a range of different interface environments: it’ll also bring the application up on an ASCII terminal. Open Software Associates president Greg Bean says OpenUI is different from other products competing for the same sort of business, such as the XVT Inc, Neuron Data Inc and Open Inc offerings because OpenUI is neither an emulator or a toolkit. When running under different interfaces, the software effectively becomes those environments, Bean claims. It’s currently available only for Motif and Microsoft Corp Windows and character-based systems – but an Apple Computer Inc Macintosh version is on the way, plus support for Novell Inc NetWare; Steve Job’s NeXT Computer Inc, which has ambitious plans for its NeXTStep operating system and interface environment is also said to be looking closely at the stuff. OpenUI costs $5,000 for a development licence. The company is staffed by a band of refugees from Hewlett-Packard Co’s former software development operation in Melbourne, Australia. When Hewlett said it was going to abandon software development over there, the employees bought the technology and went off and formed Open Software Associates. Currently it operates out of California and Germany, and has a couple of dozen employees.
