#: 12069 S12/OS9/68000 (OSK)
    04-Sep-91  05:35:46
Sb: Your Standards Texts
Fm: Mark Griffith 76070,41
To: Ed Gresick, 76576,3312

Ed,

I read both your files on interfaces and standards for OSK developers.  I think
we have talked about many of your ideas before and I agree with all that you
mentioned.

One of the problems that the new OSK programmers will have is just as you
mentioned, coming from a different environment and needing to new the "new way
of doing things".  Even for CoCo owners this will be a little difficult if they
have never used termcap before. As you said, they are to used to hardcoded
screen controls.

I might add that if anyone DOES NOT follow Ed's advice, they and their programs
will be doomed to die a quick death.  Well, not the programmer too (wry grin). 
This field is different and there are very many more non-graphics OSK systems
out there than MM/1s or TC-70s.  This does not mean you should not program for
these newer machines and their graphics capabilities, but you shoudl keep in
mind what Ed said.....if you do not absolutely NEED graphics in your program,
don't put it in.  You'll be cutting yourself out of a very large part of the
OSK market.

What I am doing, and my suggestion is, put some code in your program to detect
if it is on a graphic terminal or not, such as a getstat to get the window type
or something like that.  If this succeeds, then go for the graphics, if not,
then resort to using a termcap environment.  This will mean that you'll have to
have two different interfaces built into the program, and it will be
correspondingly larger, but you will gain greater flexibility, and reach a
larger market.  Not only will the program run on many different types of
machines, but if say an MM/1 user calls his machine from work and logs in,
he/she will be able to use the same familier software from a terminal without
changing anything.

Mark