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The Interface Designer

GUI Goodness

"Wrapping" UNIX programs in a graphic user interface

Issue: 6.5 (July/August 2008)
Author: Toby Rush
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 8,931
Starting Page Number: 42
RBD Number: 6515
Resource File(s): None
Related Web Link(s):

http://www.monkeybreadsoftware.de/realbasic/plugins.shtml
http://realbasic.maccoding.com/#Authorization

Known Limitations: None

Excerpt of article text...

Thanks in part to REALbasic, the number of programs available for Mac users is large and steadily growing. Thanks to the UNIX foundation of OS X, Mac users have access to another world of software that ranges from soccer tournament management to home automation: the approximately 7.5 fijillion UNIX utilities and applications available on the web, often for free.

The problem with these programs is that they are not easy to install or even use; many of them are command-line tools, meaning they are run from the Terminal in OS X and usually have relatively obscure and even unintuitive text-based interfaces.

However, these UNIX programs can be extremely powerful, and they are ripe for "wrapping": that is, adding a Mac-like graphic user interface to make the program easy to use for people who are unfamiliar with how the Terminal works.

Command-Line Utilities

UNIX programs can run in a few different environments, including X11, which is a UNIX graphic user interface system. The ones with the simplest interfaces however, are the ones we are going to focus on: command-line utilities. These programs are run by calling them with a string of text from the Terminal's command line. A handy example of this kind of program is ls, a built-in program which displays the contents of a folder on a disk. Using ls is simple; type "ls" followed by a space and the path of the folder you wish to view. For example,

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Article copyrighted by REALbasic Developer magazine. All rights reserved.

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