OWL Next




After Borland dropped the support for the Borland C++/ OWL line, and aimed their efforts at C++ Builder, Yura Bidus began development of OWL Next - a freeware upgrade to OWL5, which contains many bug fixes and new features.

Also OWL Next can be used not only with Borland C++ 5, but with Visual C++ 5 and 6, with C++ Builder, with the free command-line compiler Borland C++ 5.5 and with gcc++.

Greg Chicares has written a comprehensive instruction about installing and compiling OWLNext. It can be downloaded here. NOTE: Updated version is now available at the OWLNext site.



The drawback with OWL Next is that it is only an upgrade to OWL 5, so OWL 5 must be purchased before using OWLNext. It can be aquired from a supplier, which stocks discontinued software, by searching in ebay.com, Recycled Software, EMS Professional Software, or from the Companion CD which comes with Professional and Enterprise versions of C++ Builder.

Yura had started talks with Borland about releasing the source of OWL, and starting an open-source project, but so far the replies were that there are some legal issues, and it can't be done quickly.

My co-worker, Boris Vidolov, wrote a tool for converting Borland C++ resource files to Visual C++ compatible resource files. The difference is that in Borland .rc files the bitmaps can be contained in binary format inside the file, whereas in Visual C++ they must be in separate files. The tool can be downloaded from download/RCConvertor.zip.


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