Messages

1

Suggestions and Requests / Re: Port to OS X?

« on: March 23, 2006, 09:08:32 pm »

How incredible passive that is! Amazing. Did those marketing guys ever hear of market potential instead of just sitting around waiting for customers to ring at the door? I have a decent international network of (Java) developers that I know and I think that around 5 - 10 % of them develop on mac (and another 30% on Linux btw), some of them can be considered 'community leaders' too, meaning that if you get them to like EA and write about it, it'll get you a bunch of new customers too. Where do I apply for that marketing position?

You're quite right! Lots of people - not just development types are taking to OS/X, it finally makes sense, a bullet-proof operating system, first rate graphics, fast and less expensive hardware and, with all that, Unix as the underlying engine.

Even marketing types are quite keen on it!

I've had to go for other products as well because of this not working on the Mac. I wonder how many other people have without saying anything on the forum.

It is like the old-fashioned English shops that used to say that they didn't stock X because there was 'No call for it' and then go on to complain about how you're the forth customer this week who has been irritating enough to ask for it!

2

Suggestions and Requests / Re: Port to OS X?

« on: February 07, 2006, 10:46:13 pm »

Perhaps a Visio/UML user could correct me, but most relevant comments on this forum suggest that Visio can neither read another app's XMI, nor export XMI readable by another app - except Visio!

Visio, nasty as its GUI is, isn't quite that hopeless. It is possible, and I've done it, to export XML from Visio and import it into Omnigaffle - you get a couple of warnings, but it does work. Visio has managed to import very simple XML, but did choke on most of the XML that I presented it with from Omnigaffle. This only works, to my knowledge, with Visio 2003.

3

Suggestions and Requests / Re: Port to OS X?

« on: February 07, 2006, 05:50:12 am »

Hi,

just out of curiousity, you think EA is quite expensive? What other tools with remotely similar feature set have you seen at lower price?

Bruno

None. That isn't quite the point though. If I simply want to design UML processes, I can use free software from SourceForge, Omnigraffle that comes free with my iBook (an extremely good tool, actually) or the horrible Visio that's very expensive for the rubbish that it is, but happens to be on my customer's machines.

Part of my problem, actually, is that, though Omnigraffle exports to XML, Visio (at least the version my current client is using - they're skinflints rather when it comes to software) can't read it, or create imports to it. So I have to use my own laptop and recent copy of Visio to import stuff and export it so that it can be read at work - a very messy job.

I'd far rather pay the money and get this tool - but it is as useless to me as Visio if it doesn't run on the Mac!

4

Suggestions and Requests / Re: Port to OS X?

« on: February 07, 2006, 05:28:29 am »

I'm very sure there's no plan. EA is based on MS Access - that means: this is nailed to MS. You could use VirtualPC with the need for an additional Windows license

That is so sad! I wonder who could possibly make a design decision like that when working with UML - it beats me completely - but that point has been made in other posts.

For me it's simple. I think this is a great product. I can use it at the customer site. I don't use windoze at home, so I'm not going to buy it, or recommend it to the client. I've been looking at other products that do UML well, and there aren't many that are this good, so I think that I'd like to get it - it is quite expensive, but if I could get it for that price on both my Mac and the MSdros machine at work, then it would be well worth it.

It's a pity, really, as I have to decide what tool actually to use for the process design that I'll be doing over the next few months and this is a tool that I was recommended, and I like. All for a silly design mistake - it makes the point of the usefulness of open design and UML rather strongly, though, if you don't mind the irony!

5

General Board / ITIL process definition

« on: February 07, 2006, 05:39:41 am »

Has anybody used EA, or UML, to define the ITIL processes?

I'm working on this at the moment. I'm particularly interested in the Change Management and Service Level Management at the moment - but I may well be interested in the other processes in the future.

The reason for asking is fourfold. If you have done this:

- Do you have any templates, XML, diagrams that you could share?
- What problems did you encounter?
- Did you go on to code up an application based on your design, or did you use UML to define processes in a tool? [I'm likely to be doing the latter, but the former would be more interesting to know about really!]
- Since, sadly, this tool [EB], doesn't run on OS/X, what would your second choice be?