(Hi to all - 1st post
)
I came across Autotrax DEX the last few days after looking around for a tool of this caliber.
Last time I used a Capture/PCB program was 10+ years ago when I designed a pre-MP3 player Smartmedia memory (remember these?) music loop player for PBX telephone on-hold use.
So I remember just a few things from the Protel 99SE SCH+PCB suite and that's all - been wire wrapping ever since on a handful of PIC designs.
The need to have a proper SCH+PCB program just arose again and off I go searching the web for the likes of gEDA/KiCAD/Diptrace/Eagle/Target etc etc until my head is spinning by the quantity of forum reading I have done the last few days... A behemoth of the size Protel's offspring Altium Designer etc is not only out of my $$ reach but is also too much for the use I intend to do.
So I download and run DEX for a few minutes and the UI looks impressively self-explanatory vs the other few minutes tests I did of other similar abilities programs.
I really like the emphasis it gives to this self-explanatory approach since I intend to use whatever program I get into a handful of times a year so I will always be forgetting how it works and need to relearn it over and over again.
However I will not go for it.
Why?
From the web-searching I have done on it it seems that it is an one-man-show engineered product of Mr. Iliya Kovac.
Even if the developer Mr. Kovac is of super human abilities, there is no way to properly go through all stages a proper modern software suite demands. He must be going after bugs (his or of the underlaying environment software development tools) all the time so no way to provide proper user support or manage to have it all fixed up in time.
Modern software development goes through team work of mobile and active persons willing to listen to feedback.
So it seems I shall be going the route of the only company I found reporting that they have plans for a native Macinstosh port of their software
and steer clear of impressive but married-to-retailers solutions (also I would love going the Kicad/gEDA way but they still seem lacking a bit in polishing, though pretty capable).
Which is a shame since I really liked the potential I saw in the DEX approach...