Blog of the Sage

MenuSharing - how could I forget you?

As I was wondering down memory lane, it hit me like a ton of bricks! One of the coolest features ever to come to the world of software integration - MenuSharing.

MenuSharing, for those of you who never experienced it (since it was only ever avaiable on the Mac), is a way to create your own custom menu(s) using the Menu Editor of Frontier and have that menu(s) appear inside of another application - Finder, StuffIt, Netscape, etc. Each menu item had a script attached to it - usually one to do something specific inside that application - but it didn't really matter, it could do anything!

So with Frontier you could not only automate applications - but you could add your own commands to their menu bars, including key equivalents, hierarchicals, etc. I even added MenuSharing to my old OSA Menu product, so that ANY application (esp. the Finder) could become a menusharing client.

MenuSharing had pretty much died away with Frontier itself as a scripting language, when an enterprising programmer (Alco Bloom) reimplemented the server-side of MenuSharing for his URL Manager software - thus enabling him to live inside of Netscape and IE w/o having to hack the OS!

It would be interesting to see a technology such as this come back to life under both Mac OS X AND (for the first time) on Windows...

My life on the Frontier

Although Dave did an audio blog about his thoughts, feelings, etc. on Frontier - I figured I'd add my two cents...

NOTE: I'll probably get this timeline wrong - it's been a while - but the points are there. If you have comments on the timeline, let me know!

Dave first introduced me to Frontier around 1990 when I was working at Software Ventures on the MicroPhone terminal emulation software (remember those things ;), and also helping out my friends at Aladdin on their new company and StuffIt. At that time, Dave was building this programming environment and a key aspect was the ability to leverage other applications - via IAC (InterApplication Communications). So Userland put together the "Userland IAC Toolkit" for developers to use with their apps to be callable from Frontier. Pretty cool stuff for 1990!

Of course, Apple was hard at working on their System 7 and it included the technology now known as Apple events - an OS level IAC mechanism. So the IACToolkit was updated to support both the older technology AND Apple events (handling the internal complexities for the developer).

I worked with Dave and Userland to get IACToolkit support into three products (MicroPhone, StuffIt and the Disinfectant Anti Virus app) as part of a demonstration of the technology at the Apple Developer's Conference in 1991. It was a neat demonstration and got a lot of interest in the technologies and products.

From there, I become a pretty active user of Frontier for use in automating many of my own personal processes including software build systems and communications, and building a lot of little utilities in UserTalk instead of C! While other folks were playing with Hypercard, I was doing useful stuff with Frontier. I was also heavily involved with Apple and the development of AppleScript, it wasn't a place I was productive - Frontier was!

During my time with Frontier, I contributed a bunch of code to Dave and Doug (Baron, the other main developer of Frontier who really doesn't get the credit he deserves!) of which most seems to still be in there! I also wrote a number of heavily used UCMDs (plugins for Frontier) including the TCP UCMD that was later replaced with a "kernalized" TCP module and the StuffIt UCMD, for native compression/expansion facilities. Bottom line - it was a great time and I had a lot of fun!

I think I finally left Frontier behind me, when it left me - moving from a scripting and automation system to one focused on web content management, syndication, etc. There is no question that from a business decision Dave and Userland went the right way - and we have things such as RSS and XML-RPC because of it - but it wasn't where I was going...

But now Frontier has been "freed" and I am hopeful to find the time to get back into using it - and contributing to it!

Frontier goes open source!

Dave Winer, infamous "father of blogging", Mac/Apple harasser, etc., has announced that the software product, Frontier, that he and his company Userland developed has gone open source.

Although I haven't used Frontier in years (since it decided it was a web publishing system and not a general purpose scripting system), I worked closely with Dave on Frontier from pre-release through version 5. So I am quite excited to see it come back to life as it was originally intended, and with access to the code to see how things work under the hood.