A/UX 3rd Party Product Guide

[Alexis Rosen]

schiebel at cs.wvu.wvnet.edu (Darrell Schiebel) writes:
>In the January '91 issue of MacUser in Alexis Rosen's A/UX article,
>it was mentioned that an "A/UX Third Party Product Guide" exists [...]

Yeah, well, it does (I see someone else answered your question).

The problem with this guide is that it one of the few places where Apple really
fell down on the job. Their marketing folks totally lost control on this one.
A/UX _is_ very compatible with many Mac apps but there are plenty of mistakes
in this guide. Also, the room Apple had at MacWorld in August where they did
some testing was not impressive... it was basically up to "well, yeah, this
starts up fine under A/UX... OK, it can open and save documents... yeah, this
looks OK. You're compatible."

Now most of the time, that's OK, because the app really is compatible. But
take Fourth Dimension, for example. That database is listed in the guide, and
it is most certainly _not_ A/UX compatible (although it _looks_ like it's
compatible... Until you try to run it twice...). On the other hand, FoxBase,
which has as much of a market share as 4D does, is not listed, even though
(as far as I can tell, and I've used it a lot) it _is_ compatible. So Apple
did not test on the basis of which applications were most used. I'm at a loss
to explain what criterion they did use.

There's one other problem. Many products which don't exist, or which aren't
yet released, are in this book. I think that that's done in poor faith, and
that _nothing_ should be in that book that hasn't been tested by Apple. After
all, if they want to distribute a book of A/UX advertisements, they should
call it that.

This is one of the things that MacUser forced on me. I would not have written
about it this way, and did not- you're reading the Editor's words. As far
as I know, Apple did not have any direct hand in that, so I don't blame them
for it.

---
Alexis Rosen
Owner/Sysadmin, PANIX Public Access Unix, NY
{cmcl2,apple}!panix!alexis