David Duley wrote:
>I beg to differ.  Ivex makes crap!  Some executive took his high school kid's
>fortran project and thought he'd make a buck on it.
>Win Board is full of major bugs.  Its not worth the bits it is written with.
>Mike Mike Mike.  Confess........you haven't really used it for anything.  If
>you had you would be on a soap box (like I am) telling the world what a piece
>of dung this thing really is.  It smells so bad an African dung beetle
>wouldn't waste the time rolling it into a ball.

Everytime somebody asks what's a good schematic capture/layout program, Ivex
comes out as a wonderful product and somebody (like me) exclaims that it's a
piece of crap and not worth anything.

I have never had good experience with it (on about 6 or 7 PCs over the last
seven or eight - I keep breaking down and trying it again and getting mad
that I wasted my time).  I have never been able to get even the demos
working properly!  I have the original product manuals from 1989 from
Omation, the original authors, and I'm a registered user for the 100 pin
freeware version, so nobody can say I haven't given it a good try.

I am also not very happy with the product from the pricing point of view.
Those 100 pins limit you to unreasonably trivial designs (when I did my
book, I was originally going to provide the bare board designs from
Winboard, but 100 pins wasn't sufficient for _any_ of the projects in the
book).  In fact, I would have had to buy the full version to even attempt (I
have very little confidence in the product that I could actually get through
it) pretty well anything but the most trivial.

But, somebody always says that it's a good product and the previous
version's problems are fixed (and like a lemming walking out to sea, I try
it yet again).

I'm curious; I've been watching this for years and there are people who say
it's great and then there's those of us who say that the time spent trying
it out would have been more productively spent shoving toothpicks into our
eyes.  I've never seen a comment that's somewhere in the middle (ie "it's a
bit buggy, but I like it").

So, let's get this resolved once and for all - all those who are using
Winboard, put your money where your mouth is and let's see what you've done
with it!

How about an Ivex promoter publish some designs that they've done in .gifs,
.jpgs, .pdfs, or postscript file formats so we can all see them?

I would, but all I could present is screen captures of Windows telling me I
have a fault from "General Protection" (which is usually followed by "PFC
Reboot").

myke

Check out "Programming and Customizing the PIC Microcontroller" at:

http://www.myke.com