From: jesper@harry.xanthus.se (Jesper Lundh)
Subject: Now Shipping: CraftMan 1.1 for NeXTSTEP 3.0
Keywords: CraftMan, Xanthus, Multimedia, Programming
Organization: Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Kista
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1992 16:41:25 GMT

--------- Xanthus International Ships CraftMan 1.1, 
--------- Multimedia Programming for NeXTSTEP 3.0

Stockholm, September 22, 1992 - Xanthus International AB today announced  
that it is shipping CraftMan 1.1, its multimedia programming tool for the  
NeXT computer platform. CraftMan 1.1 is designed to run under NeXTSTEP  
3.0.

Aimed at both commercial and in-house corporate developers as well as  
multimedia artists, CraftMan is a complete tool for building real  
multimedia applications for the NeXT platform. For example, CraftMan can  
be used to create impressive presentations and highly efficient  
computer-based training applications, as well as to build graphical  
interfaces to other applications. In addition, it is an ideal tool for  
rapidly prototyping applications with real functionality. 

"CraftMan has many things in common with tools like HyperCard for the  
Apple Macintosh and Visual Basic for Windows," says Jesper Lundh,  
marketing manager at Xanthus." Basically, it is object-oriented program  
development for normal computer users. But CraftMan is also carefully  
designed to grow with the user, so even proficient C-programmers can  
develop programs in a fraction of the normal development time using  
CraftMan."

CraftMan lets users design complete multimedia applications   including  
the user interface   for the NeXT platform without having to program in  
Objective-C. Instead, users write the necessary program code in the  
built-in CraftScript language.

As a complete tool, CraftMan includes all the building blocks needed for  
building multimedia applications: 

- user interface design tools
- drawing tools
- multimedia object types like image, sound, animation and video
- a powerful and easy-to-use object-oriented scripting language

The user interface is designed by dragging objects from palettes,  
importing graphics and sound from any other application and by free-hand  
drawing.

The functionality of the program is defined simply by dragging connectors  
between objects and by connecting CraftScript code directly to interface  
objects like buttons, sliders and text-fields.

CraftMan takes full advantage of NeXT's multimedia capabilities, including  
32-bit color PostScript graphics with alpha channel for portraying  
transparency; CD-quality stereo sound; on-screen video; and animation. For  
example, partly transparent animation objects can run "over" any other  
object, and graphics can be displayed "over" live video.

The built-in scripting language CraftScript is a user-friendly, truly  
object-oriented language that can be used even by non-programmers. With  
CraftScript, users can build complete scripts by simply selecting language  
components from a list. CraftMan is fully integrated with the NeXTSTEP  
operating environment and can control other NeXTSTEP applications and  
exchange data by sending CraftScript messages to them.

CraftMan is also delivered with a run-time module that makes it possible  
to freely distribute CraftMan programs. The run-time module can run  
CraftMan programs but not edit them, making it easy for many users to run  
the same CraftMan programs without having to purchase more than one copy  
of CraftMan .

CraftMan 1.1 is available now.

For more information about CraftMan, please contact craftman@xanthus.se

Xanthus International, headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, is a privately  
owned software development company that specializes in the NeXTSTEP  
platform. CraftMan is the first in a series of general-purpose  
productivity tools for NeXTSTEP. Xanthus International was founded in  
1990.