Anthony Frausto-Robledo (afrausto@architosh.com)

8 August 2001

Part 1 - Exclusive interview on VectorWorks for Mac OS X

Part 1 - Exclusive interview on VectorWorks for Mac OS X

Part 2 - Exclusive interview: Future Nemetschek Product Direction

Sean Flaherty, CTO of Nemetschek North America

Anthony Frausto-Robledo, Editor of Architosh.com

Continued from Page 1

SF Challenging isn't really the word. Apple has done a really good job over the last couple of UI revisions in OS X, which handle these specific conditions.

There are some emerging Apple standards which we are keeping an eye on. For example something that was be passed around the team this morning is Apple is recommending less use of group boxes, saying that they add visual clutter and I haven't seen the final form of this in the Apple Human Interface Guidelines but certainly it is going to be interesting when and if they make this departure, which in the Windows interface is very group box heavy. And we may be forced to adjust that in the future.

AFR What do you mean by the group box?

SF Group box is when you have a bunch of radio buttons and a box around it with a label on it.

AFR Sure. OK. I see what you are talking about.

AFR Now I know of some Apple applications, like Final Cut Pro, where they have almost custom looks to them. Do you have that ability to make custom looks too if Aqua doesn't quite size up to usability in VectorWorks for OS X?

SF No. We would be happy with one working look. Like I said, everyone does things differently. Some applications don't rely on the standard Apple controls and that is how they can create custom looks. And that is what you are seeing with things like Cinema4D and Final Cut, where people are actually drawing the things themselves.

I'm not sure that is necessarily the direction we want to take. I don't know how you feel...but I look at a lot of things and as a class, the media viewers and music players, are some of the most nonstandard interfaces out there. They look really neat...but CAD is a much deeper application.

We all have lots and lots of functions, and buttons and menu commands. And I think we are exactly the type of application that doesn't want to break with the interface rules because we want things to scale...where users can take the knowledge of the operating system and apply it to getting into the CAD application.

AFR That's why I asked, because to my eyes—and I think to a lot of people—Aqua seems to be a bit heavy and on the big side and it appears to be challenging for some developers to get things all fitting nicely.

SF Right. Well Mac OS X at Nemetschek NA has been a controversial update because there are a lot of diehard Mac users here which I think say the same thing as what you are saying, which is the look is not necessarily a full win.

AFR Right, that's right.

SF But, I'm certainly willing to give Apple a shot and work with it a bit longer. I certainly think that visually it is really quite stunning. And I think Apple is working to tune out some of the things that don't work. And Paul is pointing out to me that Apple put in a small Aqua look, which is one of the last things they have done.

AFR What are your plans after you have Carbonized with VectorWorks? Do you have plans to begin a Cocoa version?

SF No.

AFR So you never—I mean, well never is a big word...

SF Ya, never is a big word!

AFR At this time you have no plans on a Cocoa version?

SF No. I don't know how much you follow the developer news, but I have been disappointed at the amount of marketing that Apple put into Cocoa versus Carbon.

They have really left lingering in some people's minds that Cocoa is somehow superior, or more native than what you can get with Carbon. But just recently, especially since WWDC, they have been more active in promoting the fact that Carbon is a full fledge way to create native OS X applications. And more importantly right now it is the only way to avoid a dual development problem...of having to do an OS X target and an OS 9 target.

And that's what we're trying to avoid. Whenever you do things twice you have twice the chance of introducing reliability problems.

AFR Ya, what you are saying is enlightening and makes a lot of sense.

SF Apple is really working to overcome this perception but at the same time something they are trying to do—and this is a subtle but very important change—is they are trying to get back into the developer tools business, in the same way that Microsoft controls the tools market for Windows development.

When the operating system manufacture doesn't provide the tools you can get into a problem where you can have a lag between the capabilities of the operating system and the capabilities of the tools. And Microsoft is very very good about that. When Windows 2000 was coming out and now with XP coming, developers were using reliable tools long before the release of the operating system. And I think Apple is trying to be more like that.

AFR When the OS X version is ready to ship will it have any additional features or inherent abilities over the classic version at that time?

SF They are both going to be the same version. It will be one executable that runs in either Carbon OS X or classic OS 9. This is not a feature upgrade. It's going to have a lot of maintenance fixes only.

AFR What about PDF printing and PDF production out of OS X? Will that be implemented as a service in the OS X version?

SF I don't think it needs to be OS X only. Or necessarily Macintosh only. We use the QuickDraw interface. And we aren't really familiar with the internal OS X PDF features. We have it as an internal development task to look at the features with that.

AFR OK. So basically when OS X comes out somewhere in the October time frame what users can expect is essentially version 9.0 running on OS X. Is that correct?

SF Yes. It will look just like version 9. It will have all the same features of Version 9 with the Aqua look and running native under OS X instead of the emulation environment.

AFR What about printing. Is there going to be good printer/plotter support under OS X? Are you guys working in tandem with the plotter people like HP and Epson?