Responding instantly to Apple Computer Inc’s complete integration of the proprietary Macintosh environment with its A/UX Unix (CI No 1,388 and page five) Hewlett-Packard Co has unveiled its own easy-to-use graphical user interface for Unix. The HP Visual User Environment – HP VUE – is designed to enable users to perform basic tasks with no knowledge of the operating system. It features the now-commonplace pull-down menus, dialogue boxes and mouse cursor control and provides built-in help at every level for the novice – while experienced users can by-pass it and use the keyboard as usual. The HP VUE shell can be extended to include all system commands and will be offered in separate versions for the Apollo family and on the HP 9000s but the two systems will be merged as soon as that becomes possible. It is built on the X Window System Version 11 and OSF/Motif and will also will be the graphical user interface to the NewWave object-oriented environment when NewWave is used with Unix. Apollo users will be able to display both VUE and the original Apollo Display Manager windowing environment and all Display Manager applications. HP VUE for the Domain/OS includes File Manager, which features an icon-based representation of a file system and enables users to traverse and manage directory and file systems locally and on remote computers. Users can open a file on one workstation while accessing other applications located on other workstations anywhere on the network. HP VUE also includes things like a clock, calculator, a scheduling and diary program, menu-driven access for help and a Unix system manual. An integrated visual editor provides basic editing features such as cut, copy and paste, and global search and replace. The HP-UX version of HP VUE is an extension of the Apollo Domain/OS version, adding Workspace Manager, Style Manager and Help Manager: Workspace Manager is an extended version of OSF/Motif Window Manager, which gives users more than one workspace on a workstation – perhaps one for computer-aided-design work and another for office automation tasks, with easy switching between them. Style Manager helps users to modify the X11 workspace applications, and control colours, fonts, the network and other resources. Help Manager enables users to receive context-sensitive help on any graphical object or window of an application, and has an applications program interface so that developers can add consistent help to their applications. HP VUE is available for Apollo Series 2500, Series 3500, Series 4000, Series 4500 and Series 10000 Domain/OS-based workstations and needs Release SR10.2 up of the operating system and 8Mb memory. The user licence, media and documentation are expected to be available in May 1990 for $550. HP VUE is expected to be available for HP 9000s for $550 in the third quarter and will need 8Mb and HP-UX 7.0 up. Starting in the third quarter, HP VUE will be bundled as part of the Instant Ignition program in which users can have system software preloaded on a disk when a workstation is bought. Merging of the two VUEs is planned for the fourth quarter, when the combined version will merged and bundled with all Hewlett workstations. Hewlett also expects VUE to be available on the Open Software Foundation’s OSF/1.
