The Taligent Inc Partners Early Experience Kit includes an early version of the Taligent People, Places & Things user interface metaphor, which the company says extends current graphical user interface metaphors by putting real-world-type functionality on the desktop. People is an integrated electronic mail system that uses business card icons representing individuals or groups to […]
The Taligent Inc Partners Early Experience Kit includes an early version of the Taligent People, Places & Things user interface metaphor, which the company says extends current graphical user interface metaphors by putting real-world-type functionality on the desktop. People is an integrated electronic mail system that uses business card icons representing individuals or groups to send messages, and has a single mail collection point for all services in use. Places is essentially the distributed component, which will use sets of postcard icons to enable users to navigate a system. A postcard may take you to a door which will take you to another department where you can find the document you’ve been looking for, even if that is at a remote site. And Things are icons for printers, facsimile machines or other devices, which are represented as they’d look in an office and perform all the functions you’d expect from their real-world relations. Taligent says it’s on schedule to ship beta Taligent Application Environments by year-end, a 1.0 release in the first quarter of 1995 and the other components like the Taligent operating system by mid-1995. It is currently only up and running under AIX Unix but Taligent showed a Windows NT version last week and plans OS/2, HP-UX and other implementations.
