Hewlett Packard Co is not the only company working at widgets, the X-Window user interface toolkits. Sony Corp’s Sony Microsystems says that it will make available free to all end users and software developers its own widget toolkit. Widgets can help application user interfaces to be standardised and moved among systems supporting X-Window Version 11. Sony, which is a full member of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s X Consortium, and markets the NEWS range of 68030-based technical workstations, claimed that it was not restricting the product by licensing as it believed no proprietary barriers should exist to making application software readily available on all systems that support the X Window standard. The widget set was developed in Japan using object oriented programming technology, and includes buttons, pull-down menus, menus, windows, text and dialogue boxes: object oriented techniques will allow the expansion of the tools by changing the intrinsics of objects, said Sony. The company has sent the software to the X-Consortium and requested that it is distributed on the Consortium’s general release tape of X.11. Available this autumn, Sony widgets will be incorporated as part of a future release of the company’s NEWS-OS version of Unix 4.3BSD, and is expected to be the basis of a forthcoming graphical user interface in development from Sony, apparently called PopDesk.
