[Textures] The present and new future of Textures (was Re: The future of Textures)

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 27 juin 2013 à 11:56, Reinhard Diestel <ReinhardDiestel at math.uni-hamburg.de> a écrit :

> Dr Allegra Smith, widow of the late Barry Smith, creator of Textures, has now replied to my original post in the TeX StackExchange forum, and following this we have established personal contact. This looks very promising for Textures as far as personal commitment from her side is concerned. However, things should obviously be handled with the utmost care and sensitivity.

Having not been back to the TeX StackExchange forum <http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/108497/what-happened-to-textures-and-bluesky-research> since your message, I only realized yesterday that information had just been posted. And looking more closely today, the situation even seems to be progressing by the day.

Since this may be of interest to members of this list, here's a quick summary:


- Work is underway to bring back the Blue Sky web site. The new site address is

	www.blueskytex.com

The site yesterday wasn't operational (I experienced myself "You don't have permission to access / on this server."), and was announced to probably not be for at least another month.

But it is actually online today, though not fully: for example the original news page <http://www.blueskytex.com/news/news.html> is back, but not the additional news pages about alpha and beta OS X Textures, whose addresses should be something like <http://www.blueskytex.com/news/220a.html> and <http://www.blueskytex.com/news/220b.html> (based on the former addresses at www.bluesky.com).

As to the activation key server, I haven't tested it since my copy of Textures still has a valid activation key.


- The Blue Sky company (originally Blue Sky Research, later Blue Sky TeX Systems) is still existing. The person supervising the web site reconstruction is the company president, Dr. Allegra Smith, widow of Barry Smith. Her contact address is

	president at blueskytex.com


- Mrs. Smith did not take lightly the idea, evoked earlier in this list, to reverse-engineer Textures. Anyway, in the light of the above announcements, that idea seems now totally irrelevant.


Thanks for your behind-the-scene efforts, and a big thank you from the Textures community to Mrs. Smith for her efforts in these difficult times of loss.

Bruno Voisin