AppShell Appbuilder

[Matt_H]

I don't think these ever made it out the door. There's some info/code in the Commodore server dump that was circulating a year or two ago. The build of appshell.library in that archive is dated May 13, 1992, so I think this was something that CATS canceled, as opposed to it being ended by the bankruptcy. There's also an older release notes file (May 1991) that makes reference to appshell.library, appobjects.library, prefs.library, and hyper.library.

Of those, hyper.library is the only thing I recognize/understand, since it was an early name for what eventually became amigaguide.library. prefs.library appears to be an abandoned concept for a preferences system that was never fully implemented. I don't really understand what appobjects, appshell, and AppBuilder would have done.

Interestingly, there is also some archived correspondence from Inovatronics about AppBuilder, suggesting that Commodore may have outsourced development to them. I thought maybe AppBuilder eventually became CanDo, but the first release of CanDo predates all this work, so that's probably not the case.

[Matt_H]

David Junod would indeed be the one who knows what the story is. He's responsible for so many important AmigaOS innovations. He's even got a font named after him!

I wonder if AppShell eventually became SYS:Classes/ in Release 3? When did the A4000 ship, November 1992? I guess the six months between then and May 1992 could have been enough time to do that adaptation...

Eddy Carroll's DevCon writeup seems to imply that ToolMaker shipped, but I don't recall seeing on the Dev CDs. Maybe Commodore UK made it available? The Dev CDs seem to be built from CATS US material, which could explain its absence there. From what I can gather, it seems like AppShell/AppBuilder were to be the new-and-improved iterations of ToolMaker. I still don't understand what AppObjects was supposed to be.

There is a build of ToolMaker in the server archive from July 1992. It's definitely a 2.0-era program - no NewLook menus, doesn't use the display database for a screenmode, and it isn't font sensitive. It seems like it would have been a "good enough" tool but not a "great" tool that advanced the state of Amiga UIs. Something new would have been required for the 3.0 era.

As far as actual available UI tools, Hollywood/Designer seems quite capable and there are a few UI toolkits specifically designed for it, including an MUI interface. But Hollywood is a bit resource-heavy. On the traditional side, there's GadToolsBox. I think there was also something called ReActor for building ReAction UIs.

[Matt_H]

Did some more digging and found that AppShell was written up in the 1993 DevCon notes. It was to have provided a basic application framework with access to ARexx, AmigaGuide, new IPC standards, prefs, and other elements, the idea being that developers wouldn't have to implement all this stuff manually (incidentally, this also explains the cross references to hyper.library and prefs.library). Moving those functions to a shared library would also cut down on application code size.

AppShell sounds similar in some ways to OS4's application.library, which I always had a hard time understanding - I don't see a (user-side) difference between application.library and commodities.library.

At any rate, my previous theory on appshell.library evolving into SYS:Classes/ appears to be incorrect.

The notes also confirm that Inovatronics was handling development of AppBuilder, explaining its absence from the Commodore server dump. They also say that Toolmaker shipped in 1992. Maybe I missed it on the Dev CD?

[Matt_H]

To the best of my knowledge, neither AppShell nor ToolMaker ended up in the hands of the paying 3rd party developers in Europe. No material pertaining to either can be found on the Amiga Developer CD (1992), nor on the more recent Amiga Developer CD compilations (1.1, 1.2 and 2.1).

ToolMaker promised to ease what at the time still required a lot of manual work: building an application from scratch, with a working, powerful user interface.

NeXTstep's "Interface builder" showed how you could do that, and the industry (Microsoft, Apple, IBM, etc.) quickly began adapting its concepts (results started materializing by the mid 1990'ies).

The trend really caught on. Nowadays, it seems like every other vendor on the planet is selling UI mockup tools for mobile applications.

A friend of mine who was a CBM dev did have Toolmaker, it look like a 2.0 application. I'm not sure how good it was though.
Kamelito  update found this on usenet  https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.sys.amiga.programmer/UObhRwAY_Vg

So it looks like ToolMaker was released/available, just not through CATS. As a result, it seems to have flown under the radar of most of the people who would have benefited from it.

The little acorn from which MUI grew was MagicFileRequester, in 1992. Arguably, the asl.library rewrite of the same year (developer previews were available in the first quarter of 1992) already featured a dynamically generated GUI which took font, screen resolution and window size into account. But MagicFileRequester leapfrogged it with ease

And that little acorn is now also the native file requester in MorphOS. I love learning about the origins of these things

That was the idea: we get a framework to build applications upon. In practice, however, we were left to our own devices.

For example, creating a working, consistent ARexx interface for an application is not terribly hard, but if you lack the necessary documentation (Commodore never shipped anything comparable to William S. Hawes' own ARexx manual and developer material, until it was already too late), you're stumped.

Building GUIs on top of gadtools.library was possible, and so was building your own user interface components through BOOPSI. At least the basic tools were available in Kickstart 2.0, whereas in the "dark age" preceding it you had to hand-craft every GUI right down to the look and feel of the building blocks. So, things were easier, but starting with Kickstart 2.0, you still had to hand-craft the GUI, but you no longer had to hand-craft all the building blocks yourself.

Until just now, I hadn't even realized that MUI eventually mostly filled that gap. Just like arp.library and req.library in the 1.3 era, never underestimate the ability of Amiga developers to come up with their own solution!

Regarding that 2016 server dump: absence of material from that archive does not imply that it has been lost, or never existed in the first place

Indeed, it's only a partial backup. I hope someone has a full copy somewhere. It's an important historical artifact worthy of preservation. I know you have more, but I don't know if you have everything

[Matt_H]

Did a little more digging and found that AppShell was included on the 1991 DevCon disks which subsequently made it onto some of the Developer CDs. So at least that component was publicly released. Surprised it didn't get any use within the developer community at the time...