faustus@ic.Berkeley.EDU (Wayne A. Christopher) (01/28/88)
> Have anybody ported the University of Washington > VLSI design tools - Magic - to Mac II? Is there > someone out there planning to? Please let us know! I should point out that Magic isn't from the University of Washington, but rather from the University of California at Berkeley. Wayne
lawitzke@eecae.UUCP (John Lawitzke) (01/29/88)
in article <154@liutde.UUCP>, markus@liutde.UUCP (Markus Kaipainen) says: > Have anybody ported the University of Washington > VLSI design tools - Magic - to Mac II? Is there Magic is part of the UCB VLSI Tools and not the UW VLSI Tools. UW just provides a copy of the UCB Tools on their distribution tape. -- j UUCP: ...ihnp4!msudoc!eecae!lawitzke "And it's just a box of rain..." ARPA: lawitzke@eecae.ee.msu.edu (35.8.8.151)
buzz@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Mahboud Zabetian) (01/31/88)
in article <154@liutde.UUCP>, markus@liutde.UUCP (Markus Kaipainen) says: > Have anybody ported the University of Washington > VLSI design tools - Magic - to Mac II? Is there I use MAGIC on color Suns. I like it a lot, but I just wish that the mouse and menus weren't so illogical and would work like like a mac mouse. Two things I hate the most: In scroll bars, you never know how much you are going to scroll. If you want to scrollone page, you have to guess where to click. When you want to draw a rectangle, you click with one button aand then the other. Why can't we just drag??? I hope someone ports this to a Mac(how hard can it be on A/UX?), and I hope they use the Mac interface guidelines. -- Mahboud Zabetian buzz@phoenix.princeton.edu 183 Little Hall (609) 520-1271 Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544 (609) 734-7760 ****** Anyone need a soon-to-graduate hardware/software engineer? ********
cswarren@enzyme.berkeley.edu (Warren Gish;133 Biochem;x3-9219) (02/01/88)
In article <1601@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> buzz@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Mahboud Zabetian) writes: >in article <154@liutde.UUCP>, markus@liutde.UUCP (Markus Kaipainen) says: >> Have anybody ported the University of Washington >> VLSI design tools - Magic - to Mac II? Is there > > >I use MAGIC on color Suns. I like it a lot, but I just wish that the mouse and >menus weren't so illogical and would work like like a mac mouse. At MW Expo, Jeff Deutsch was hanging out at the SuperMac/Levco booth to plug his TransSPICE(TM) program which can utilize from 1 to 20 Levco Translink transputers in a MacII. The user interface is currently command-line, but Jeff says he's working on a Mac-style interface. The word from a friend at a large S. Valley chip co. who demoed TransSPICE recently is that the program can handle larger circuits than can the software they use on Intel 386-based machines. Without a transputer, TransSPICE was only negligably faster on the MacII than on a 386-based machine; with a single transputer, it was 6X faster (on the circuit(s) tested). This speed is apparently most important for Monte Carlo simulations where up to 20 simulations can be carried out simultaneously (100X faster than a MacII). The transputers are not cheap, though. And although Jeff did not mention price, his program may not be cheap either. For more info, contact Jeff Deutsch at (415) 856-9168. TransSPICE is a trademark of Deutsch Research.
alh@cblpn.ATT.COM (alh) (02/13/88)
I am interested in "xylene" ??? lsi technology. I don't know who offers
it or how to use it but I would like to get information on sources and
how well it has worked for others. Any information would be helpful.
Al Housel
Bell Labs
{ihnp4!cblpn!alh}howard@cpocd2.UUCP (Howard A. Landman) (02/18/88)
In article <1601@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> buzz@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Mahboud Zabetian) writes: >I just wish that the mouse and >menus weren't so illogical and would work like like a mac mouse. Don't confuse "unlike a Mac" with "illogical". They're not the same thing. >When you want to draw a rectangle, you click with one button aand then the >other. Why can't we just drag??? This is derived from Caesar, and makes perfect sense with a 3-button mouse. The advantage is that, if you have a rectangle that's slightly wrong, you can adjust it with a single click. If dragging is your only alternative, then you are forced to redraw (re-drag!) the entire rectangle, which is impossible if the rectangle is not all on screen. Further, suppose you are trying to draw a very large rectangle that must be precisely aligned. With dragging, you must zoom out to a large-scale view and hope your mousework is precise. With clicking, you can zoom in to each of two opposite corners and do precise placement very easily. So, fundamentally, the problem with dragging is that it assumes that you will never want to select a rectangle that is not entirely on-screen. Similar sorts of brain-damage can be seen in MacPaint, which won't let you erase or draw on any part of the page that isn't on-screen. So, if you've lassoed something, and you want to move it to a place where even a single pixel of it would be off-screen, you can't. You have to put it down (but what if you don't have anywhere to put it without destroying something?), move the window to a different part of the page (which must cover BOTH the place you put it AND the place you wanted to put it), re-lasso it (if you can), and then put it where you really wanted it. Blecch! (And HyperCard "solves" these problems by not letting a card be bigger than an original Mac screen!) Finally, recall that Caesar and Magic were originally developed on systems whose displays were serial devices hanging off an RS232 port. Imagine how slow and stupid dragging looks in such an environment, and the load it places on the I/O of your (time-shared) computer. Even on a single-user computer, with high bandwidth to the screen, the overhead of dragging would compete for CPU with Magic's background incremental DRC. >I hope someone ports this to a Mac(how hard can it be on A/UX?), and I hope >they use the Mac interface guidelines. The Mac interface, while well thought out, is not the ultimate interface. HyperCard doesn't conform to the Mac interface guidelines. Neither does original Smalltalk-80. There are tons of INITs and DAs which do nothing but patch problems (oversights) in the standard Mac interface, system, and finder. Modal dialogs are pure poison to multitasking. And all Mac users take for granted that any program can crash the entire machine, something that no UNIX user would tolerate for a second (but, UNIX takes longer to reboot :-). Of course, with only one mouse button, some severe changes will have to be made. Maybe shift-click and option-click and command-click can substitute ... -- Howard A. Landman {oliveb,hplabs}!intelca!mipos3!cpocd2!howard howard%cpocd2.intel.com@RELAY.CS.NET "I don't really see, why can't we go on as three?" - J. Airplane