[developers] Re: Macintosh version of LKB now publicly available

[John Carroll]

> Thanks, John.  I'm sure there will be students at the Institute
> this summer (in the HPSG class, for which we're doing an optional
> Matrix-based implementation lab) who will be very happy to be
> able to use the LKB on their own macs!

I've exchanged emails with one of them already, Rebecca Nesson from 
Harvard. She contacted me directly after seeing me mentioned on the 
LkbInstallation web page. She successfully installed this new version 
today.

> --- Occasionally, clicking on a node in a parse tree and
> clicking on "Feature Structure --- Edge NN" can take a long
> time to execute, pretty much taking over the whole computer
> in the process.

If you wiggle the cursor, does it change to a watch image? Or is it a 
pointer the whole time? It sometimes seems a little slow to me, but 
perhaps I've got used to it. I'll see if I can make this more 
efficient.

> --- Since there's no window with all of the trees, the
> menu option "generate" is not available.  However, "generate
> from edge" on the root of any given tree is equivalent, so
> this is not a big deal.  (Only something I and others should
> be aware of when writing lab instructions for students working
> with diverse platforms.)

That's how the CLIM version used to work, until Rob Malouf added the 
small parse trees facility, which of course is much nicer when there 
are several trees.

> --- The (expanded menu option) "compare" command doesn't seem
> to do anything.  This is unfortunate, since I find that a
> very useful grammar debugging tool, but perhaps the option should
> be greyed out if it's not functional?

Unfortunately there is quite a lot of CLIM stuff behind compare. I've 
fixed things so that unimplemented menu items are greyed out. I've put 
a new version in 'stable'.

John