NewWave: Microsoft Windows-қа арналған графикалық орта және өнімділік құралы

the graphical desktop environment

NewWave is a discontinued object oriented graphical desktop environment and office productivity tool for PCs running early versions of Microsoft Windows (beginning with 2.0). It was developed by Hewlett Packard and introduced commercially in 1988. It was used on the HP Vectras and other IBM compatible PCs running Windows. From a user perspective NewWave ran on top of Windows and completely replaced the standard Windows Desktop and Program Manager user interface with its own object oriented desktop interface. HP promoted NewWave until the release of Windows 95, at which time further development of the product ceased due to incompatibility with the new operating system. The NewWave GUI (together with the contemporaneous NeXTSTEP GUI) introduced the shaded "3 D look and feel" that was later widely adopted. HP encouraged independent software vendors to produce versions of applications which took advantage of NewWave functionality, allowing their data to be handled as objects instead of files. One early example was Samna Corporation (later acquired by Lotus) who produced an edition of their Microsoft Windows word processor Ami Pro entitled "Ami Pro for NewWave". On June 20, 1988 Microsoft Corporation and Hewlett Packard issued a press release announcing the inclusion of NewWave support in an up coming release Microsoft Excel. NewWave featured icons, scheduled scripts in the form of "agents", and "hot connects." The “NewWave Office” term had been used previously to describe the main NewWave user desktop.

In its original November 1987 press release Hewlett Packard described NewWave as “an application environment designed to provide personal computer users with a single method to access data and files from multiple sources on a company’s network”. It was developed by HP’s Personal Software Division (PSD) in Santa Clara, California, United States, as part of their distributed computing environment strategy,

In addition to MS Windows style indexed help articles NewWave introduced a context sensitive help facility. This allowed a user to click on a ‘Help’ menu option which added a query symbol to the mouse arrow; once switched into this ‘help mode’ the user could click on any part of the NewWave environment or any menu command to have the help for that item displayed in a pop up window.

Working in conjunction with the NewWave Agent the computer based training functionality of NewWave allowed developers to build interactive lessons into the desktop environment and the applications themselves. This allowed users to learn with actual live applications in a non destructive way. The feature was dropped in later versions of NewWave due to the increased disk requirements it imposed and the limited hard disk space available in PCs of the time.

The NewWave Agent was a task recording and execution facility, which could work across multiple applications. Users could record any sequence of tasks performed within the NewWave environment. Recorded tasks generated a BASIC like source code, which could be repeated unmodified, or edited and expanded to create sophisticated automated and interactive activities.

NewWave included some built in applications, which were fully integrated with the Object Management Facility, NewWave Agent, Online Help and Computer Based Training features. Non native NewWave applications could be integrated into the environment using “advanced bridges”, allowing their live data to be embedded in compound documents. The standard end user version of HP NewWave included bridges for HP’s own PC applications, such as HP Graphics gallery, MS Windows tools (calculator, calendar, notepad etc.) and many common third party applications. Users could also create their own bridges to other applications using the included Bridge Builder tool. Bridges could be exported for use on other NewWave enabled systems and were often shared amongst the NewWave user community.

HP described NewWave Write as a basic to intermediate level “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWIG) word processor with support for compound documents.