DOUG@ysub.ysu.edu (Doug Sewell) (01/25/91)
Over two years ago, I saw the advertisements for Matrix Layout, a program designed to generate programs from interactively-designed flowcharts. It would generate C, Pascal, Basic, or ready-to-run .EXE files. It looked Too Good To Be True (tm). I bought the $10 videotape. Again, it looked impressive. I plunked down my plastic money, and waited. And waited. And waited. After waiting two months, I called, suspecting 'vaporware'. If I remember right, they said the product was developed in Europe, and the demand for it was so strong that things were very back-ordered. Finally, it arrived. I opened the package, read the real brief 'read me' and jumped into installing it (there were no manuals provided). I found the eighth disk (of eight) was bad. They shipped me a replacement set of disks by UPS overnight. I sat down and installed again. Everything went smoothly until it attempted to update my (read-only) autoexec.bat without my permission. It failed. I copied it, made it updatable, and reinstalled (from scratch, just like Windows 2). The last thing the install program did was reboot my machine with the new autoexec.bat. I was unhappy. I was even more unhappy when a TSR conflict showed up. I booted from a floppy, fiddled a bit, and took the lines to load their TSR drivers and start their GUI DOS shell out of my autoexec.bat and put it into another batch file. My impressions started to go downhill from there. I then found out there wasn't a way to print out the manuals (you had to use the hypertext reader to look things up online), that the language had no support for arrays, etc. I was promised a manual-printer would be available 'real soon', and that 'two or three people were writing books about Layout, they were going to pick the best and offer it at a discount to current customers'. I tried to write a fairly simple application, got fed up with the limitations, gave up, and wiped it from my hard-drive. It was a product that claimed a lot of promise, people were writing large applications with it, others were developing 'black boxes' to provide database, communication services, and the like. They had a bulletin board with lots of code, utilities, black boxes, and plugs for add-ons. Having said all of that: 1. Did anyone write a serious application with Matrix Layout ? 2. Did R2 improve on this state of affairs ? 3. Are they still around ? They haven't advertised recently in Computer Language, and they're not in the Programmer's Connection catalog any more. I never upgraded to R2, and probably wouldn't even if the price was still good, but I just ran across the upgrade offer in some old files. -- Doug Sewell, Tech Support, Computer Center, doug@ysub.bitnet Youngstown State University, Youngstown, OH 44555 doug@ysub.ysu.edu Everybody needs a little love sometime; stop hacking and fall in love!