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Front End Loading By Peter Naulls. Published: 11th Mar 2003, 14:46:04 | Permalink | PrintableDave Watson presents the final entry in our competition Because this article coincides with the release of a program, we've delayed it until the program itself was ready. Thanks again to all our entrants, and with luck, we'll have another competition in the not-too distant future.
Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. However FEer is a different story. FEer leads to tranquility. Tranquility leads to love. Love leads to ..um, .. a 128MB Iyonix with RISC OS 5?
Well, maybe not. But FrontEnder (FEer for short) is a program that allows you to make wimp front ends for command line based programs without the need to do any actual programming. Here's the history:
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4 years ago a crack coding unit was sent to program without financial support an application they didn't commit. (*) This app promptly escaped from a maximum security network to the RISC OS underground. Today, still wanted by the community, it survives by a stroke of good fortune. If you have a back end. If noone else can help. And if you can download it. Maybe you can use FrontEnder. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang...
Ahem. So, I picked up version 1 of this unreleased app and started adding improvements. Now, version 2 is ready for its premier. Basically all you have to do is write a simple script to tell FrontEnder what you want. It will then create all the necessary windows, icons and menus that you need and do all the other wimp stuff so you don't have to.
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
For example, the script for the front end for finger is less than a quarter of a kilobyte. This makes FrontEnder an excellent tool for making the cli programs ported from unix by Peter Naulls et. al. easier to use. In fact, any *command you type can be given a front end.
Cool, huh?
“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave? Stop, Dave. I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it.”
OK. I'll leave you to play about with FrontEnder and I'll get back to
watching telly.
(*) Well, it was commited (to CVS) but let's not let the facts get in the way of a good A-Team parody.
Links
Frontender website
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