[OS X TeX] Flashmode and Alpha?

[Joachim Kock]

>Has anyone tried to get Flashmode working with Alpha as an external
>editor?   Is there any hope of this?

(I assume you are referring to Claus Gerhardt's applescript
application.)

Claus himself gave it a short try in January 2005, and asked for
some advice on this Mailing List about applescripting Alpha.
Although he got several detailed replies, apparently he abandonned
the idea shortly after.

There was instead a flashmode prototype internal to Alpha, cf.
http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/MacOSX-TeX-Digests/2005/MacOSX-TeX_Digest_01-09-05.html

This featured some new ideas that are perhaps still worth some
attention: instead of polling, it worked by notification, the various
involved components communicating through a pipe and via event hooks.
It also used a dynamically precompiled custom tex format.

It was not developed any further.  The last version is from May 2005,
and I just tried: it is not compatible with the current AlphaX 8.2
developer releases.  (Should work with AlphaX 8.0.2 though.)

Cheers,
Joachim.