MacWorld part 2

[Dan Shafer]

A friend of mine went to MacWorld, saw this thing, bought it, installed 
it, poked at it, and sent me a note.

As some of you may know, I wrote one of two books published on Prograph 
before that product/company essentially went belly-up. (Hmmm. I hope I 
don't have the decidedly unhelpful effect on *all* the companies whose 
products I write books about. heh heh)

My friend (like me) was a fairly ardent fan of Prograph and we were 
both sad to see it go away. It truly is the ONLY completely visual 
programming environment I've ever seen and although it takes a while to 
wrap your head around it, its power was truly amazing. And it really is 
fully object-oriented.

That said, the ultimate disappointment of Prograph was that even though 
it seemed like it ought to be a way to bring programming to the 
Inventive Users I know and love so well, alas, it embodies a very steep 
learning curve. Combined with the fact that screen size limitations 
make it all but impossible ever to see any but the most trivial of toy 
apps on the screen all at one time in source code form (which makes 
top-level view and debugging a nightmare), Prograph turned out to be 
not nearly as productive as we'd all hoped it could be.

Still, I wrote a HUGE and very successful internal app at Cisco Systems 
using it and still have a soft spot in my softheart for it.

Dan

On Jan 14, 2005, at 2:40 PM, Mark Wieder wrote:

> All-
>
> Much more briefly this time, since I've been laid up in bed for the
> last couple of days with a cold and accompanying sinus headache which
> has unfortunately kept me from even thinking about doing any real work
> at the computer.
>
> I dug through the pile of papers that I brought home from the show and
> found what I alluded to in the MacWorld expo report. The product is
> Marten from andescotia (www.andescotia.com). This is ProGraph finally
> brought into the new century. I'm not privy to all the lawyerese that
> goes on behind the scenes here, but apparently the IP issues are
> pretty serious and they can't (at least) use the ProGraph name. It is
> very cute, though, especially at $58. OSX 10.3.3 or better, so it
> won't run on any of my ancient hardware (that MacMini is starting look
> more attractive). They're planning on marketing it as a hobbyist (read
> non professional developer) tool. A single mouse click builds a
> double-clickable application, but you can also export the program as C
> code (nice touch) for speed.
>
> -- 
> -Mark Wieder
>  mwieder at ahsoftware.net
>
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