by DonHopkins | 2025-06-24 20:44:40+00:00
Since they bought Sun Microsystems, Oracle now owns the rights to the NeWS source code, so unfortunately I'm not legally allowed to post the NeWS server source code on my Github page, although I spent many years unsuccessfully fighting to make NeWS free and evangelizing it to anyone who would listen, like RMS and my colleagues and customers at Sun:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/rms.news.txt

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/news-ooo-review...

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/questionaire.tx...

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/grasshopper.msg...

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/sevans.txt

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/Explanation.txt

But since you asked so kindly and said "please", here are some youtube videos, articles, and presentations -- thank you so much for asking and expressing your interest in learning and reading my ideas and code, I'm deeply flattered and delighted to oblige your request! ;)

You asked for it, you got it: Toyota!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVHg1CjqLk8

Do you have any interesting video demos you've recorded or papers or articles you've written that you'd like to share about your own ideas for personal display servers that solve all the problems too? Or comments on any of these?

Ben Shneiderman introduces Pie Menus developed by Don Hopkins at UMD Human Computer Interaction Lab:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxkfqgAkgDc

>University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab Pie Menu Demos. Introduction by Ben Shneiderman. Research performed under the direction of Mark Weiser and Ben Shneiderman. Pie menus developed and demonstrated by Don Hopkins.

Brad Myers introduces Just the Pie Menus from All the Widgets:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOLS9I_tdKE

>Pie menu demo excerpts from "All The Widgets" CHI'90 Special Issue #57 ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review. Including Doug Engelbart's NLS demo and the credits. Tape produced by and narrated by Brad Meyers. Research performed under the direction of Mark Weiser and Ben Shneiderman. Pie menus developed and demonstrated by Don Hopkins.

Brad Myers CMU course 05-440 / 05-640: Interaction Techniques (IxT). Intended for Undergraduates, Masters and PhD students!

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter/

>Don Hopkins was one of the original developers of Pie Menus, and helped contribute to their popularity in games. He published a frequently cited paper about pie menus at CHI'88 with John Raymond Callahan, Ben Shneiderman and Mark Weiser. He then developed and refined pie menus for many platforms and applications including window managers, the Emacs text editors, universal remote controls, TV guide browsers, web browsers, visual programming interfaces, SimCity, The Sims. These took advantage of many kinds of hardware including desktop, mobile, VR, OLPC, mouse, stylus and touch screens. He has published many free and open source software implementations of pie menus for X10, X11, NeWS, Tcl/TK, ScriptX, ActiveX, OpenLaszlo, Python, JavaScript, C#, and Unity3D.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/schedule...

Video of Don Hopkins' presentation to Brad Myer's CMU IxT class: Pie Menus: Definition, Rules, and Future Directions:

https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...

An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus (ACM SIGCHI'88):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie...

Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective. By Don Hopkins, Ground Up Software, May 15, 2018.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1

The Design and Implementation of Pie Menus: They’re Fast, Easy, and Self-Revealing. Originally published in Dr. Dobb’s Journal, Dec. 1991, cover story, user interface issue.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-design-and-implementation-...

NeWS Tab Window Demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4

>Demo of the Pie Menu Tab Window Manager for The NeWS Toolkit 2.0. Developed and demonstrated by Don Hopkins.

HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Browsing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZi4gUjaGAM

>Demo of NeWS based HyperTIES authoring tool, by Don Hopkins, at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab.

HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Authoring with UniPress Emacs on NeWS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU

>Demo of UniPress Emacs based HyperTIES authoring tool, by Don Hopkins, at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab.

HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...

PSIBER Space Deck Demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuC_DDgQmsM

>Demo of the NeWS PSIBER Space Deck. Research performed under the direction of Mark Weiser and Ben Shneiderman. Developed and documented thanks to the support of John Gilmore and Julia Menapace. Developed and demonstrated by Don Hopkins.

Described in "The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines".

Micropolis Online (SimCity) Web Demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE

>A demo of the open source Micropolis Online game (based on the original SimCity Classic source code from Maxis), running on a web server, written in C++ and Python, and displaying in a web browser, written in OpenLaszlo and JavaScript, running in the Flash player. Developed by Don Hopkins.

Micropolis Web Demo 1:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlHGfNlE8Os

>Micropolis Web is the browser based version of Micropolis (open source SimCity), that uses WebAssembly, WebGL, and SvelteKit. Based on the original SimCity Classic code, designed by Will Wright, ported by Don Hopkins. This first demo shows an early version that runs the WebAssembly simulator and animates the tiles with WebGL, but most of the user interface is still a work in progress.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39432832

>Simon Schneegan's "Kandu" cross platform pie menus, as well as his older "Fly-Pie" and "Gnome-Pie" projects, let you create and edit your own pie menus with a WYSIWYG drag-and-drop direct manipulation interface. [...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44090952

>Here's an X11 window manager, with pie menus and tabbed windows, entirely written in object oriented NeWS PostScript, from around 1991:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39432170

>Vertical tabs are better in some situations and for some users, horizontal tabs are better in other situations and for other users. So all users should be able to choose to place tabs along any side of any window, and change which side and what position any tab is at any time. Not just tabs for emacs frames or web browser windows, but for ALL windows including top level and internal application windows. And you should also be able to mix tabs from different apps in the same frame, of course. Why not?

>I implemented tabbed window with pie menus for UniPress Emacs in 1988, and still miss them! Later in 1990 I developed several other versions of tabbed windows with pie menus for NeWS that let you manage any NeWS and X11 windows, and drag the tabs around to any edge. [...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39432449

>It bewilders me that any rational UI designer would be so arrogant as to make the unilateral unchangeable decision for all their users that they should only have tabs on one side, be it the top, bottom, left or right of the window. Why restrict users to using tabs on only one side and one side only? What's so special about that side, and bad about the other sides? What if the user is left handed, or has a tall monitor, or a wide monitor, or lots of windows, or only a few?

>While you're at it, why not just remove all the arrow keys from the keyboard except one? Then users can argue over whether the left-arrow key is better than the up-arrow key, and users who don't like having only an up-arrow key can buy a keyboard with only a left-arrow key.

>But all keyboards have all four arrow keys, so there are no arguments about which arrow is better: you just use whichever arrow you want, whenever you want.

>Most people prefer to use all four arrows at different times for different purposes, and put their tabs along all four edges, too!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44173283

>In practice that's what you could do with HyperLook on NeWS: SimCity, Cellular Automata, and Happy Tool for HyperLook (nee HyperNeWS (nee GoodNeWS))

>HyperLook was like HyperCard for NeWS, with PostScript graphics and scripting plus networking. Here are three unique and wacky examples that plug together to show what HyperNeWS was all about, and where we could go in the future!

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-go...

HyperLook SimCity Demo Transcript

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-simcity-demo-transcr...

>This is a transcript of a video taped demonstration of SimCity on HyperLook in NeWS.

Discussion with Alan Kay about HyperLook and NeWS:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-browser...

>Alan Kay on “Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?” and a discussion of Smalltalk, HyperCard, NeWS, and HyperLook

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22456831

>Thanks for asking! ;) I've put up some old demos on youtube, and made illustrated transcriptions of some, and written some papers and articles. Sorry the compression is so terrible on some of the videos. Here are some links: [...]

Lots of old NeWS code:

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/

Including the NeWS Tape, a big collection of free NeWS software that I curated and distributed via Sun Users Group:

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/news-tape/

And of course PizzaTool:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-...

NeWS PostScript PizzaTool Source Code:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt

PizzaTool shipped with Solaris, and here's the manual entry I wrote:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.6.txt