Amulet V3.0 Release

We are proud to announce the release of Amulet V3.0. This release of Amulet runs on Unix using X/11, on the PC using Microsoft Windows NT or Windows 95, and on the Macintosh. This release has been tested with gcc v2.7.2 and 2.7.2.1 and Centerline's ObjectCenter Version 2.1 using X11/R5 and X11/R6. On the PC, it has been tested with Visual C++ V4.0, V4.2 and V5.0 under Windows NT (3.5.1 and 4.0) and Windows 95. On the Macintosh, it was tested with M68000 and PowerPC processors with CodeWarrior v10 and CodeWarrior Pro 1 (CodeWarrior 12). Users also report that it works on many other platforms ranging from Linux using gcc to QNX/X-Windows using Watcom 10.6 and OpenVMS using the DEC compiler. This release will probably also work with other up-to-date compilers.

For general information on licensing and copyright issues see Section 1.3 of the Amulet V3 Reference Manual. For complete license and legal information, see Section 1.12.

Get it now!

Changes

The changes since V3 beta are mainly small bug fixes, and fixes to the manual. If you got Amulet V3 alpha, please note that there is an important change since the earlier V3 alpha releases. You must now use Set() to change the value of a slot that is already present in an object and you must use Add() to put a value in a new slot. Due to an unfortunate oversight, checking for the use of Add versus Set was disabled in earlier releases. This means that code which ran without warnings under an earlier V3 alpha release may now generate many run-time warnings. These are easy to fix, as described in the change document.

Version 3 has lots of new features, and is quite advanced over V2.0. The changes since V2.0 are quite extensive. Primarily, we have added:

Animation using the novel and easy to use animation constraints.
An interface builder for laying out widgets interactively.
Multiple looks and feels that mimic Motif, Windows 95 and Macintosh.
A mechanism to save and load Amulet objects to files.
"Wrappers" for external types so it is easier to put them into Amulet objects with full type checking, printing and editing.

The change document lists the full set of changes. 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.

Before downloading, please let us know who you are:

Real Name:
Affiliation:
Email Address:

	Click on this box to be added to the Amulet-Interest mailing list. This list is used only for announcements of new versions and gets only about one message every few months. If you subscribe, you should get a welcome message soon. Warning: This is an unmoderated list
	Click on this box to be added to the Amulet-Users mailing list. This list is used for questions about Amulet and discussions from all users, and also receives all announcements sent to Amulet-Interest. This list gets an average of four or five messages a day. If you subscribe, you should get a welcome message soon. Warning: This is an unmoderated list
To get off either list, send mail to amulet@cs.cmu.edu. Do NOT send unsubscribe messages to the entire amulet-users or amulet-interest lists!

Then use the "Back" button on your browser to return to this page and download the software.

Downloading Amulet

For Unix source code:
Amulet V3 for Unix is available as a compressed Unix tar file (amulet.tar.Z).
For PC source code:
(note: small update on 4/9/99 to make compile with Visual C++ 6.0)
Amulet V3 for Windows NT or 95 is available as a ZIP archive (amulet.zip) that can be extracted using WinZip 6.2 . For help concerning this download, see our FAQ .
For Macintosh source code:
Amulet V3 for Macintosh/CodeWarrior 10 is available as a BinHex of a self-extracting archive (amulet3_cw10.sea.hqx).
Amulet V3 for Macintosh/CodeWarrior Pro 1 is available as a BinHex of a self-extracting archive (amulet3_cwpro1.sea.hqx).

See the bottom of the change document for how to uncompress, install and compile the files.

Documentation

Complete documentation for Amulet V3 is now available in various forms, but it is not distributed in the same file as the source code distribution. You must get a separate file instead. You can also access the manual remotely either as an html version or as a pdf version, or you can download your own version of the html.

In addition to the long manual, there is also a short Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) file.

The manual is available in these formats:

The html version does not contain some of the tables.
You can also search the Amulet Manual.
- The regular part of the manual should work fine. But the zip files include our Glimpse search form, which points across the net to our search server, and you would have to be online to use it.
An uncompressed postscript version of the Amulet Manual.
A UNIX compressed postscript version of the manual (use "uncompress" to uncompress).
A PC zip compressed postscript version of the manual (use WinZip or something similar to unzip).
A pdf (Adobe Acrobat) version of the manual.

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
Animation: animating Amulet objects
Amulet Widgets: objects combining graphical representation and response to input events
The Gilt Interface Builder: an interactive screen designer for Amulet
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, Ellen Borison, Alan Ferrency, Rich McDaniel, Robert C. Miller, Andrew Faulring, Bruce D. Kyle, Patrick Doane, Andy Mickish, Alex Klimovitski. The Amulet V3.0 Reference Manual. Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science Technical Report, no. CMU-CS-95-166-R2 and Human Computer Interaction Institute Technical Report CMU-HCII-95-102-R2. March 1997.

Note: If you want to reference Amulet in a paper, please use the following as the "canonical" reference for Amulet instead of referencing the manual:

Brad A. Myers, Richard G. McDaniel, Robert C. Miller, Alan Ferrency, Andrew Faulring, Bruce D. Kyle, Andrew Mickish, Alex Klimovitski, and Patrick Doane. "The Amulet Environment: New Models for Effective User Interface Software Development", IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. 23, no. 6. June, 1997. pp. 347-365.

Contributions

Several users have made souce code contributions to the Amulet library. Some contributions are platform specific, others are cross platform. We have tested some, but not all of the contributions. You can get them from the Contributions Page.

Changes

For a description of the changes between Amulet V2 and V3 see the change document.

Number of Downloads

Amulet V1 was released in June, 1995. Amulet V2 was released in Feb, 1996, and V3 in March, 1997. We started keeping track of how many downloads there were in January, 1997, and there have been a fairly steady 225 downloads a week, which works out to over 10,000 downloads a year. Unfortunately, we don't have download counts back to the initial release, but Amulet has probably been downloaded over 20,000 times. Thank you for being in that number!

Back to the Amulet Home Page.

Maintained by:

Brad Myers and Bruce D. Kyle (last updated Dec. 12, 1997)