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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