Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!ucbvax!agate!violet.berkeley.edu!steve
From: steve@violet.berkeley.edu (Steve Goldfield)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: Looking for McMax, Ingres for Mac (Re-post)
Keywords: Macintosh, dBase III+ compatibility, Ingres
Message-ID: <1990Aug15.185023.21594@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 15 Aug 90 18:50:23 GMT
References: <1990Aug7.132933.3413@ra.src.umd.edu> <1990Aug14.055348.19992@techbook.com>
Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator;;;;ZU44)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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In article <1990Aug14.055348.19992@techbook.com> jamesd@techbook.com (James Deibele) writes:
#>McMax is from Nantucket Corporation, who also publish Clipper, a dBASE compiler
#>for the PC.  From the reviews that I recall seeing, McMax is quite primitive by
#>comparison with FoxBase+/Mac --- it doesn't implement the Mac graphical 
#>interface at all, plus it's significantly slower.  There are no third party 
#>books available for it, and I believe that sales are considerably less than
#>FoxBase+/Mac.  (They've probably sold fewer copies than dBASE Mac, a scary
#>thought.)
#>
#>I'd say go with FoxBase+.
#>-- 
#>jamesd@techbook.COM  ...!{tektronix!nosun,uunet}!techbook!jamesd 

McMax Version 2.0 does implement the interface (buttons,
pull-down menus, XCMDs, etc.), though it's cumbersome to program
these and I haven't installed them in any of my databases in
McMax. It isn't significantly slower. In the MacWorld tests,
FoxBase and McMax were much faster than anything else and
McMax was only slightly slower than FoxBase.

I've considered converting to FoxBase, but as I mentioned
yesterday, that is quite painful and expensive. For the simple
purpose of running dBASE III+ programs on the Mac, McMax doesn't
have any special disadvantages compared to FoxBase and is quite
a bit cheaper.

I'm not promoting McMax, but from my experience, the negative
things I've seen about it are not justified. I've been using
it for about 3 years. One example of what I prefer; the FoxBase
program editor is a pain to use. With McMax, I use Edit, which
came with it. But Edit can't edit FoxBase files. Also, I found
that FoxBase's menu-driven, multiple-window approach got in my
way in programming and debugging a database. To me, that's an
example where the Mac approach is a hindrance.

Steve Goldfield