Cambridge, MA Ð Mesa has been shipping since today, said David Pollak, the proud president of Athena Design, speaking before a hundred NeXT enthusiasts at the August 4th meeting of the Boston Computer Society NeXT User Group.
In many ways, Mesa is the most advanced spreadsheet on any platform, Pollak said. Mesa is a full-featured, two-dimensional spreadsheet that contains many features found in popular DOS spreadsheets such as Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel. The program can read Lotus 1-2-3 files and execute most Lotus macros. It supports full drag-and-drop of color, fonts, spreadsheet cells, and graphics. Its recalculation speed of 13,000 cells per second makes it one of the fastest spreadsheets available on any platform.
The crowd was most impressed by Mesa's Object Library Interface, which allows Mesa to be used as a computation or graphing engine for a customer's own custom applications. Pollak demonstrated a sample application that generated real-time data, transmitted it to Mesa for modeling and graphing, and displayed a resultant graph in the custom application's own window.
Athena Design is also working with San DiegoÐbased Pages Software so that Mesa spreadsheets will be editable directly from that company's soon-to-be-released application. "You'll be able to edit the spreadsheet data right in your word processor. You won't have to live in your spreadsheet anymore, Pollak said.