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BAA Sustaining Members’ News
MicroAPL Ltd
MicroAPL is currently working on version 1.1 of APLX, our cross- platform APL development system for Windows, MacOS, Linux and AIX. This upgrade is scheduled for release in late June. Although we are not yet ready to publish the full list of enhancements (details will be given in Vector 19.1), amongst the new features which will definitely be included are:
- Support for the ‘structured control’ programming keywords such as :If, :For and :While.
- Support for using the double-quote rather than the traditional single-quote character for delimiting APL character vectors, making it easier to enter strings containing quotes.
- Enhanced support for graphics and images in the ŒWI sub-system.
Version 1.1 will be available as a free upgrade for existing users of APLX.
In the meantime, we have placed the two main APLX Reference Manuals as PDF documents on our website http://www.microapl.co.uk/apl. (These include the APLX font as an embedded TrueType font - you need Adobe Acrobat 4.0 or later to view them.)
Causeway Graphical Systems Ltd
Coo, we won an Award for the website! Causeway will be proudly displaying the “Cool Site Award” from http://dmoz.org for the next few weeks. I suppose it’s because we actually included some interesting and useful content - I even get the occasional fanmail from non-APL readers of the old Vector articles in the /pubs section. I think I will start to develop a lot more SVG content soon (you can try the Climate charts in SVG now) as it looks as if Adobe have succeeded in smuggling out the viewer (Acrobat Reader 5 just installs it for you without the option) to the point where it will soon be a better bet than VML.
The interesting challenge for GraPL (and by implication RainPro) is supporting some of the nice new stuff ‘native’ in our own viewer, and ideally in PDF and PNG format too. We are unlikely to do animations, but look out for decent gradient fill support and transparency over the summer. If I can keep on top of the buglist, that is - the more we sell the better it gets tested!