Amulet V2.0 Official Release

We are proud to announce the Official release of Amulet V2.0. This release of Amulet runs on Unix using X/11, on the PC using Microsoft Windows NT or Windows 95, and on the Macintosh. Amulet has been tested with gcc versions 2.6.3 and 2.7.0 (Amulet does not work with gcc version 2.5.8 due to a compiler bug) and with ObjectCenter V2.1.0. On the PC, it works with Visual C++ 2.0, 2.1, 4.0, and 4.1. On the Macintosh, Amulet works with CodeWarrior V8. Amulet works with recent versions of native C++ compilers for certain Unix platforms.

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Changes

A page describing the changes and improvements between various versions of Amulet is available. This includes changes between V1.2 and V2.0 alpha, and changes between V2.0 alpha and the official 2.0 release.

Features

Important features of Amulet v2 include:

A dynamic, prototype-instance object system that makes prototyping easier.
Constraints integrated with the object system, so any value of any object can be computed by a formula which is automatically re-evaluated whenever necessary. The programmer can also investigate with new kinds of constraint solvers.
A machine-independent graphics system that makes application programs run portably across multiple platforms (Unix, PC, and Macintosh).
A high-level object-oriented output graphics model that handles automatic refresh of objects when the change.
A high-level input model that makes it easy to add behaviors to objects. It also supports undo and help for operations.
Interactive debugging and tracing tools, including an interactive "Inspector."
A set of flexible widgets implemented using the Amulet intrinsics, so you can easily experiment with your own widgets. The current set includes:
- Buttons
- Check boxes
- Radio Buttons
- Option pop-up Buttons
- Menus
- Menu Bars
- Scroll bars
- Scrolling windows
- Text input fields
- Selection handles for graphical editing

The complete documentation on the current release is also available. The tar or zip file you FTP does not include the documentation file. You must download it separately.

Downloading Amulet

Instructions for downloading and installing Amulet V2.0 are available in plain text format. This is a text version of the first chapter (Overview) of the Amulet Reference Manual. If you cannot successfully download Amulet from this WWW page, find FTP download instructions in the Overview. The following links point to the most recently released version of Amulet on each platform.

For Unix source code:
Amulet V2 for Unix is available as a compressed Unix tar file (amulet.tar.Z).
For PC source code:
Amulet V2 for Windows NT is available as a Microsoft Windows PC zip file (amulet.zip).
For Macintosh source code:
Amulet V2 for Macintosh is available as a BinHex of a self-extracting archive (amulet.sea.hqx).

Documentation

Complete documentation for the release is available, but it is not distributed in the same file as the source code distribution. You must get a separate postscript file instead. An html version of the documentation is also available. You can access it remotely, or download your own version.

Instructions for downloading and installing Amulet V2 are available in plain text format. This is a text version of the first chapter (Overview) of the Amulet Reference Manual.

The documentation is available as a Postscript file and in several html files. There is one large postscript file containing all of the Amulet Manual. The manual is available in these formats:

The html version does not contain some of the tables. You can also search the Amulet Manual.
- You can ftp the html version of the manual to have at your local site, either in as
  - a compressed unix tar file of the html version, or as
  - a pc zip file of the html version.
  The regular part of the manual should work fine. But the zip files include our Glimpse search form, but it points across the net to our search server (gs69.sp.cs.cmu.edu), so you would have to be online to use it. It would be a little hard for you to do the search offline, but if you want to find out how to use Glimpse, send us mail.
Uncompressed postscript version of the Amulet Manual.
UNIX compressed postscript version of the manual (use "uncompress" to uncompress).
PC zip compressed postscript version of the manual (use "pkunzip" or something similar to unzip).

The complete Amulet Manual contains an Overview of Amulet with retrieval and installation instructions, a Tutorial to help new users get used to Amulet programming practices, and reference manuals for all of the parts of Amulet:

ORE: Amulet's object system
Opal: Amulet high level graphical objects
Interactors and Command Objects: handling user input in Amulet
Amulet Widgets: objects combining graphical representation and response to input events
Debugging Tools: description of the interactive "Inspector" and other debugging tools and hints.
Gem: Low level graphic and event handling routines

The Amulet documentation can be referenced as:
Brad A. Myers, Alan Ferrency, Rich McDaniel, Robert C. Miller, Patrick Doane, Andy Mickish, Alex Klimovitski. The Amulet V2.0 Reference Manual. Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science Technical Report, no. CMU-CS-95-166-R1 and Human Computer Interaction Institute Technical Report CMU-HCII-95-102-R1. February, 1996.

Back to the Amulet Home Page.

Maintained by:

Brad Myers, Alan Ferrency (last updated 11-2-96 bam)