The Fells Guild Home Page

The Guildhall Project

This site documents the Guildhall Project. This work is not a product and is intended not to be a product. I did release an earlier version for former Mac customers under a different name, but the most recent upgrade to macOS disabled that version. Portions of Guildhall as it currently stands mimic work found elsewhere, but it does not contain code from any open or proprietary source, period, full stop. I wrote it all myself and thus feel no obligation to provide any distribution of source materials. Where Guildhall is inspired by the efforts of others I will endeavor to credit them. The target audience for this project is limited. In general, only those folks with some familiarity with the origins of Seahaven Towers or the Albert Project will find it of passing interest.

Project Rationale

As a project, Guildhall serves several purposes. First, for those familiar with the fate of the Apple and IBM subsidiary called Taligent, Guildhall helps satisfy, for this author at least, a what might have been curiosity. The Pink team (at Apple) and the CommonPoint team (at Taligent) had a lot of great ideas for what an object-oriented operating system could be. Some of those ideas have since appeared in modern OS offerings. Others haven't, at least not yet. With Guildhall, if I really want to see how an idea could have worked, I can just try it out. Guildhall's APIs capture enough of the flavor of Pink/CommonPoint to make that feasible.

A second, somewhat minor purpose regards providing a practical repository for code that I adapted to depend upon Taligent's CommonPoint APIs only to have the foundation dismantled when Taligent went away. A lot of those programs had been around for years, and I adapted them to run in C++ and Pink/CommonPoint mostly to test the new OS. It wasn't in me to go backwards when that foundation went away. So instead I built a new foundation from scratch.

Thirdly, and importantly, Guildhall is a research project. It relies heavily on the Albert graphics architecture from Pink, less so on what Albert became under CommonPoint, and uses very few of the toolbox conventions of either Pink or CommonPoint. All engineering teams make tradeoffs as they build new products, and I was interested in some of the paths not taken and have continued to research them. I find there is a joy to discovering new algorithms, implementing sturdy architectures, and crafting effective user experiences. In the process of exploring alternate pathways I've had the good fortune to come across a lot of new ideas. And I'm not claiming that my efforts are all that great, just that I really enjoy working on them.

Fourth and finally, Guildhall is tailored to support my creative efforts. The Tome applet is a useful content management system. I use it for all my writing, and it allows (like all CMSs) easy page creation, linking, and media inclusion (images, graphics, and music). The Chronology applet will, when complete, let me quickly track the timelines of characters and events, filtering different combinations to see how things match up, a great tool for temporal consistency among story elements. The Atlas applet manages the maps associated with my writing. When complete it will generate content for inclusion in published stories, and prior to that it will allow quick reference to the geography of the worlds where my stories are situated. The Orbit applet simulates the satellite system around each of the planets in my stories, enabling me to describe the sky consistently as a function of story time. All of these will be supported by the content editing applets, Paint, Draw, and Acoustiq.

All in all, it's a labor of love, I think a worthy retirement project, and if it lets me tell a few of the stories I've collected over the years, all the better. So that's what the Guildhall Project is about. If you happen to peruse it, I hope you find it of interest.