From: stevej@ais.org (Steve Jovanovic)
Subject: What is TopSoft?
Organization: UMCC
Date: Sat, 26 Dec 1992 03:28:28 GMT

>What is TopSoft?

TopSoft, Inc. used to be a loose collection of programmers
that got together late in 1991 to work together to discover
all the neat new things in System7, and hopefully come up 
with a project, with source, that we could release freely
to benefit the Mac Community.

In July, 1992, we finally incorporated as a non-profit
entity, much like the Free Software Foundation, who produce
GNU products.  Since the FSF is boycotting the Macintosh
platform, TopSoft hopes that we can fill in some of the 
gaps, and provide free source code, libraries, and binaries
to the Mac community.

Our best-known, but as yet unreleased project, is FilterTop--
a file manipulation/conversion/filtration utility incorporating
many concepts from UNIX and UNIX filters, except in a graphical
environment.  Our eventual goal is to incorporate intelligence
into its design, so that a user can drop a bunch of files on
FilterTop's Finder icon, and it will try to figure out what
to do, and do it--all without disturbing the user.

If you're interested in seeing what FilterTop can do now,
we invite you to investigate and download any of our work
from our ftp site:  syrinx.kgs.ukans.edu.

For more information on FilterTop or TopSoft, please feel
free to contact us:  ts-info@syrinx.kgs.ukans.edu, or
ft-info@syrinx.kgs.ukans.edu.  We are in the process of
setting up a listserver...so we apologize if you have
any problems mailing to us.  If so, please feel free to
contact me (stevej@ais.org) and I'd be glad to forward
your e-mail to the right party...

Another long-term project we hope to get underway soon
is a port of gcc/c++ to the Mac, not under the MPW
environment, but as standalone application, possibly
using Harvest C's user-interface as a foundation.

Finally, we hope to set up our ftp site as a distribution
site for free libraries--we hope to get this going once
our team gets back from Christmas break.  We hope to 
encourage authors of libraries to adopt the TopSoft
General Public license, which, like the Gnu license,
puts code firmly into the public domain, except in our
case, there would be no restrictions at all attached 
(feel free to use our libraries in your commercial
products).  However, our libraries are NOT to be sold
directly--they are to be distributed only freely.  We'll
be posting some messages about this when we're all
back from the break...

BTW We're very anxious to get FilterTop out--a tremendous
amount of work has been put into it already, and we're
always looking for more programmers to help us finish
it off...more than anything, we'd GREATLY be indebted
for your feedback on our work so far--our latest packaged
release on syrinx is FilterTop-1.0d13.sit.hqx.  

TopSoft's goal is to get world-wide networks of people
with common interests together, to make new friends, have
fun, learn from each other, and hopefully put out some
great, freely available software (with source) for the
whole Mac Community :-)

If you're interested in finding out more, maybe you might
like to attend one of our meetings?  Each week, Wednesday
at 8 PM CST, we get together on a system in Australia and
interactively talk about dev, socialize, and in general
have a lot of fun.  To join any of these meetings, you
can telnet rocky.curtin.edu.au 1420, use "ts" as the
channel, and your first name and last initial as your
login :)  We hope to see you there! :-)

From all of us at TopSoft, Best Wishes, and Merry Christmas!

steve 

PS Here are our mailing lists:

The Topsoft lists are:

ts-announce (a list for product announcements, moderated)
ts-general (a general, chit-chat list, also gets the ts-announce mail)
ts-request (an address for mail administration)
ts-info (an address for requesting info about TopSoft)

ft-announce (a list for product announcements)
ft-general (general chit-chat, also gets the ft-announce mail)
ft-request (request to be added/removed from the list)
ft-info (an address to request info about FilterTop)

tc-announce (a list for product announcements)
tc-general (general chit-chat, also gets the tc-announce mail)
tc-request (request to be added/removed from the list)
tc-info (a list to request info about TopSoftC)

NOTE: You really should only need to be on one list in any particular project
to get the level of mail your interested in. For instance, if you only want
announcements about the FilterTop project, then you should subscribe to
ft-announce. If, on the other hand, you want to be privy to all of the general
chit-chat that takes place, you should subscribe to ft-gen: it receives
ft-announce traffic as well as ft-gen traffic.

WARNING ALL PROJECT MANAGERS: Announcements should only be posted to
xx-announce, otherwise the xx-gen recipents will get two copies of the message,
and their mailboxes will be even more swamped than usual.  ;-)

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+----------------------+---------------------------+----------------------+
| Steve Jovanovic      |  President, TopSoft, Inc. |    2918 Goold St.    |
| Marquette University +---------------------------+   Racine, WI 53404   |
| Computer Engineering | Internet:  stevej@ais.org |    (414) 632-0336    |
+----------------------+---------------------------+----------------------+
| "Blue skies above, sun on your arms, strength in your stride, and hope  |
|  in those squeaky clean eyes..." -- "Teenage Wildlife," David Bowie     |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer