President of graphical user interface tool company Visual Edge Ltd of Quebec, Canada, Michael Foody, was in Tokyo last week to announce a new tool, Visual Action Toolset, which enables developers to take Adobe Systems Inc PostScript files and used them as visual interfaces in the Unix and OSF/Motif environments. Leading Unix software house Astec Ltd will distribute the new product in Japan. Astec already distributes Visual Edge’s graphical user interface builder UIM/X and claims that 1994 will be the year in which it really takes off in Japan, at a rate of 50 to 60 units per month. UIM/X has accumulated sales of 20,000 units, including those sold both directly and OEM through vendors such as IBM Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co.Privately-held Visual Edge says its face value annual sales totalled $40m last year; its actual revenue is probably half that. Visual Action Toolset took $1m to develop, and Adobe lent assistance with coding; Foody says that Visual Action is the first suite of tools to assist Motif developers in the creation of Live Document applications, applications front-ended by high-quality PostScript documents that use pre-built widgets to lay out behaviour on top of the documents. Take-up of the product in Japan may be hampered by the relative obscurity of PostScript and particularly Display PostScript, which does not come bundled with workstations in Japan as it does in the US; however Adobe has promised to bundle Japanese fonts with the product. The price of the Visual Action Toolset in Japan has not yet been decided.
