OPEN LOOK

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OPEN LOOK (sometimes referred to as Open Look) was an early graphical user interface (GUI) specification developed by Sun Microsystems and AT&T beginning in the late 1980s for UNIX workstations.

1 Origins
2 History
3 Demise
4 References
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Origins

OPEN LOOK had its origins in the days of SunOS 4 and Sun's Motorola 68000-based UNIX workstations. It was distinguished by its oval-shaped buttons, triangle glyphs to indicate pull-down menus, and "pushpins" which allowed the user to make dialog boxes and palettes stay visible. OPEN LOOK was a definition of a look and feel rather than a specific implementation, so it could actually be implemented with different programming toolkits or even on different underlying window systems—implementations were created for both the X Window System (X) and Sun's NeWS desktop environment.

The specification was a collaboration between Sun and AT&T, which had an alliance to develop UNIX and graphical toolkits. Xerox PARC was also credited for having not only done the pioneering work in the industry for graphical user interfaces, but also for contributing to OPEN LOOK's "design, review, implementation, testing, and refinement".^[1]

[edit] History

In the early 1990s, its main competitor was the OSF Motif GUI or the vanilla X Window System twm window manager and Athena widgets. At the time, Motif was backed by most of the rest of the Unix workstation industry, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Digital Equipment Corporation.

Sun named its X Window System distribution OpenWindows, and its programming implementation for the OPEN LOOK look and feel was a choice of either the OPEN LOOK Intrinsics Toolkit (OLIT) or XView. The former was built on the XtIntrinsics toolkit common to X; the latter used the same paradigm as the GUI libraries for Sun's earlier SunView window system, making it relatively easy to use it to migrate applications from SunView to X. (There was also The NeWS Toolkit, or TNT, which as the name implies implemented OPEN LOOK for NeWS applications; support for NeWS applications was removed from OpenWindows in 1993.)

In 1990, Unix System Laboratories (USL) inherited OLIT from AT&T along with UNIX. Not long after, the codebase for OLIT diverged as Sun and USL took its development in different directions. Sun continued to enhance its version to make its look and feel more consistent with XView. USL, in an attempt to create an API to make applications GUI independent, developed the awkwardly named MoOLIT (from Motif OPEN LOOK Intrinsics Toolkit), which kept the OLIT API, but allowed users to choose which GUI they wanted at run time. The source to MoOLIT was licensed by MJM Software, who ported it to several other Unix platforms. It was used for several years, almost exclusively by AT&T and Lucent Technologies, who wanted to give their existing OPEN LOOK applications a Motif look and feel. It was not widely used elsewhere.

[edit] Demise

In June 1993, the Common Open Software Environment (COSE) initiative, of which Sun was a member, announced plans to create what became the Common Desktop Environment (CDE), unifying the GUI environment of all the major Unix players. The look and feel of this desktop was based on Motif, and Sun announced its plans to immediately offer Motif and start retiring OpenWindows and thus the OPEN LOOK look and feel.

The Motif toolkit and mwm window manager were originally offered as a standalone product for use with Sun's Solaris Operating System until CDE itself was released in 1995. OpenWindows remained the primary Solaris desktop environment until 1997 when CDE became the primary desktop for Solaris 2.6. Even then, OpenWindows was still included with Solaris and could continue to be used instead of CDE.

When Solaris 9 was released in 2002 development support for XView and OLIT-based applications was finally removed, as were the OPEN LOOK-based DeskSet productivity tools and olwm window manager. Applications already developed using XView and OLIT can still be executed and displayed in both Solaris 9 and 10.

Solaris 9 and 10 users who desire to keep their OPEN LOOK DeskSet running might want to have a look into the OWAcomp project hosted on freshmeat.net.

[edit] References

^ Sun Microsystems, Inc. (1989). OPEN LOOK™ Graphical User Interface Functional Specification. Addison Wesley, xvii. ISBN 0-201-52365-5. In the late 1980s, both Apple and Microsoft had been accused of lifting their window system designs from Xerox. By including Xerox in the OPEN LOOK design process, Sun and AT&T were working to create a GUI design free of potential litigation issues.