Palo Alto, CA Ð If its current plan to ship four products by the end of the year is carried through, Appsoft may soon be ready for prime time. The strategy calls for the $395 Appsoft Draw package to ship this month, delivery of a revamped Appsoft Image and the recently licensed Personal Information Manager by the fall, and a major upgrade of WriteNow this summer, said President Randy Adams.
Appsoft has licensed technology from an unnamed company in San Diego to build image-processing technology into Appsoft Image, leaving little of the original Pixelist code from NeXT.
The delay caused by the rewrite, however, may push the product past its 30-day NeXTstep 3.0 deadline and allow NeXT to license Pixelist technology to other developers.
The company has also licensed Personal Information Manager from Forty-two Software, of Hamburg, Germany, and plans to ship it in August. The package includes a scheduler, contact manager, and Mac-to-NeXT ASCII and TIFF converters. It will cost about $150.
This will be followed by a major upgrade of WriteNow that will incorporate the feature set of WriteNow 3.0 for the Mac now shipping from T/Maker. The application will include better color and footers control, as well as more import/export and drag-and-drop capabilities. The company is also developing a version of the word processor for the Intel platform, slated for release in September.
Adams said Appsoft is also looking at the spreadsheet and flat-file database categories and is considering developing a connectivity product that will transparently support NeXTmail capabilities on other platforms, such as the Mac.
In the meantime, Appsoft is not going to publish the Oscar animation package obtained through a nonexclusive deal with NeXT, according to Adams.