alexis@dasys1.UUCP (Alexis Rosen) (06/06/88)
ine eater still exist?]
This is my first posting since early 1986. It's great to be back!
I would like to apologize to all of you who put in so much effort on my Mac II
survey in Mar. '86; in just over a month I received almost three MBytes of
return mail, over 200 peices. Just two or three days before my first summary
was to go out, my Unix account was unceremoniously eliminated by the sysadmin
at City College, where I had guest access. (Columbia, where I once went to
college, never let students use any network mail). I was thrown off for
'overutilizing the mail system'...
It was a lot of wasted effort, but it won't happen again; I have just
discovered the Big Electric Cat Public Unix. It's the greatest bargain I have
seen in years, and there's no limit on mail activities...
In a month or so, I will start work on a "Mac III" survey. This time, it will
concentrate far more on the software and user interface, since I think those
areas are the most controversial, and the least well understood. Almost all of
the hardware issues raised in the survey were addressed by the Mac II, while
most of the software discussed has yet to be implemented.
In the meanwhile, I want to mention one peice of software I've been using very
heavily over the past three months. It's the best peice of work I've seen in a
long while: FoxBase+/Mac. It astonishes me that the best, most Mac-like
database program is written by people who were, until now, hardcore DOS
programmers. It's the most elegant commercial software I've seen recently, and
their code is CLEAN. Amazingly, it really is (depending on your application)
TEN to a HUNDRED times faster than any other "relational", programmable
database for the Mac. There are missing peices, but it's fully useable now, and
the rest is coming soon. I trust them when they tell me that, because they
shipped ON TIME, unlike everyone else, and they are *responsive*. When I call
them and say that it would be nice to have a certain feature, it no longer
surprises me to see it show up in the copy I get the next week. They also don't
rest on their laurels. The day after version 1.0 shipped, they were hard at
work on the next release, which is going to be a real killer. I've written
megabytes of code in both Omnis and 4D, and put in hundreds of hours on Helix.
Already, I can do stuff I wouldn't even think of trying in the others; I'll
never use them again. If Fox can only market it right, it has every reason in
the world to be the #1 best-selling Mac database by next year.
I just got a Beta of their new Forms Design module. It's going to be AWESOME!
It already takes care of 4D's worst problem in that area (difficult selection
of close/covered objects). It will generate user-editable code, so that the
intrepid (and the consultants) can customize anything they don't like.
If it seems to you that I'm raving about FoxBase, well, you're right. The only
software I can think of that comes close in breaking new ground for the Mac,
and doing it *the right way*, is FullWrite. There may be others, but I can't
think of any offhand.
Has anyone else used FoxBase? What are your reactions?
--
Alexis Rosen {allegra,philabs,cmcl2}!phri\
Writing from {bellcore,harpo,cmcl2}!cucard!dasys1!alexis
The Big Electric Cat {portal,well,ihnp4,sun}!hoptoad/
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