Digitizer Advice
Bill:
I believe you, but I suspect you were just "looking the other way" when
AREXX stuff was being discussed.
Bill Hawes wrote it. It has been around for a bouple years, and has indeed
been advertised, though usually in small, 1/4 page black and white ads.
It is listed for $36 in the Go Amigo! ad in the July, 1990 issue of Amiga
World, for example.
It is, to a certain extent, a programming language. But, to do most things
you don't need to get much more complicated than you would with scripts in
AmigaDOS clis and shells. Certainly, if you can do things with BASIC< you
can do a LOT with AREXX.
What is it? It is a way to make Amiga's multitasking sit up and beg. If a
program has an AREXX port, it can receive or send messages to any other
program which has an AREXX port. (At this point, since CBM is making AREXX
a part of the operating system software in ver. 2 — and, btw, this has
been written and talked about for MONTHS — virtually any serious program
either has, or will have an AREXX port.) Properly set up, that means that
these programs, no matter who supplies them, can work together in a totally
integrated way, can not only swap data, but can control each other.
An example: DigiPaint3 has an AREXX port. It is put out by MewTek.
Mindware has a program (DigiMate?) which also has an AREXX port. DigiMate
will let you create HAM animations through DigiPaint! Instead of having to
buy an expensive HAM animation program, if you already own DigiPaint,
DigiMate will work as a full animation front end for you (and is relatively
inexpensive).
Mindware also has a 3D rendering program with an AREXX port. So, one of
the Amiga magazines had a utility on its disk which used this port to a)
generate a set of 3D letters in PageRender (the Mindware program), and then
output them as encapsulated postscript files which could be imported into
DTP programs. Now, if the DTP program had an AREXX port, you could set it
up so that this could all become totally automatic!
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