Description
OPEN LOOK is distinguished by its oval buttons, triangle glyphs to indicate pull-down and pull-right menus, and "pushpins" which allowed the user to make dialog boxes and palettes stay visible. The overall philosophy was to provide a clean, simple and uncluttered interface, so that the user's focus would be on the application rather than the interface. In fact, the original OPEN LOOK design was black and white only; a "three-dimensional" look and feel with shading was added later, in response to the 3-D style effects in Motif.
It is a definition of a look and feel rather than a specific implementation, so it could actually be implemented with different programming toolkits or even on different underlying window systems—implementations were created for both the X Window System (X) and Sun's NeWS.
Sun developed an X Window System distribution based on the OPEN LOOK look and feel, calling it OpenWindows. Its programming implementation for the OPEN LOOK look and feel was a choice of either the OPEN LOOK Intrinsics Toolkit (OLIT) or XView. The former was built on the Xt Intrinsics toolkit common to X; the latter used the same paradigm as the GUI libraries for Sun's earlier SunView window system, making it relatively easy to use it to migrate applications from SunView to X.
There was also The NeWS Toolkit, or TNT, which as the name implies implemented OPEN LOOK for NeWS applications; support for NeWS applications was removed from OpenWindows in 1993.
In 1990, Unix System Laboratories (USL) inherited OLIT from AT&T along with UNIX. Not long after, the codebase for OLIT diverged as Sun and USL took its development in different directions. Sun continued to enhance its version to make its look and feel more consistent with XView. USL, in an attempt to create an API to make applications GUI independent, developed the awkwardly named MoOLIT (from Motif OPEN LOOK Intrinsics Toolkit), which kept the OLIT API, but allowed users to choose which GUI they wanted at run time. The source to MoOLIT was licensed by MJM Software, who ported it to several other Unix platforms. It was used for several years, almost exclusively by AT&T and Lucent Technologies, who wanted to give their existing OPEN LOOK applications a Motif look and feel. It was not widely used elsewhere.
Read more about this topic: OPEN LOOK
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