Comments on Amulet


This is a list of some comments we have received on the mailing lists about Amulet. All of these are unsolicited comments, edited only for clarity, and then reproduced here with permission of the authors.


"The best to you all. And gradulations on your job. You do it perfectly. It amazes me all the time when open software makes such a better thing than a big company."
1 Jun 2000
-- Kis Balint, ODD Ltd., Budapest, Hungary <kisbogyo@odd.hu>


"I am an Engineer and Programmer at Boeing in Canoga Park, CA. I just wanted to let you know that I have been using Amulet 3.0 quite a bit for the past year and a half, and I continue to be very impressed. ... I hope that the Open Amulet project continues..."
06 Oct 1999
-- Aaron N. Rinn, Boeing, Rocketdyne, <Aaron.Rinn@West.Boeing.com>


"I have to say that over the last few months developing our product, I have widely used many aspects of Amulet and its internals, and I still get blown away by its elegance and the power it gives you. We can't speak highly enough of Amulet. For those other guys to pretend to take up the Amulet challenge is somewhat bewildering to us as they just don't get it. We are both very saddened by the current state of the Amulet project but we know it will have it's day - when the world catches up probably. Such an amazing thing won't just disappear. I'm hoping that my explorer becomes popular/controversial which can only be good for Amulet."
18 Oct 98
-- Michael Gibson, <mig@linkworks.co.nz> Linkworks Limited, New Zealand


"The two primary reasons I choose to implement the interface in Amulet is (1) it's cross-platform support (Linux and NT in my case) (2) the constraint system allows me to easily tie all three views together... Other GUI analysis tools the company looked at were too cost-prohibitive to purchase but with Amulet I was able to construct an intuitive analysis tool in a little over a week. This last week at SIGGRAPH our company announced a software only real-time MPEG capture and compression program (the first s/w only solution). We wouldn't have hit this deadline without our Amulet based analyzer. A big pat on the back for the Amulet team. I've started work on another Amulet project... Again, I am finding the Amulet constraint system to be a very convenient mechanism for implementing this."
-- Billy Pace, Ligos Technology, <bsabsa@earthlink.net>
26 Jul 98


"I'm having a play around with the Amulet sample applications and I'm finding it quite easy to learn. If this style of programming takes over from using X11 widgets then I will see it as a forward step."
-- Telford Tendys, Faculty of Engineering, University of Technology, Sydney, Austrailia, <telford@eng.uts.edu.au>
4 Dec 97


"Amulet with its open code interface, its recompilation on each platform, its visual interface constructor, its fairly extensive complement of GUI features, and its good documentation has established a significant presence in the PIGUI [Platform-Independent Graphical User Interface] field. With C++, performance is not a problem and programming environments are familiar. External interfacing seems reasonably non-obscure, from what I've seen. Its free availability has so far been a huge advantage. My best wishes to the Amulet team."
-- Eric Keller, Laboratoire d'analyse informatique de la parole (LAIP), University of Lausanne, Faculty of Humanities, Section of Computer Science and Mathematical Methods, Switzerland. <eric.keller@imm.unil.ch>
24 Nov 97


"The internal Amulet code isn't hard to understand - the coding style is quite clean and straight-forward, in my opinion. Right now I'm just amazed at how well the interactive debugger works. It's really something. I haven't seen anything like it since I worked with ParcPlace's VisualWorks, a high-end SmallTalk implementation. Frankly, I never dreamed that anything like the Inspector could even be implemented in a C++ environment."
-- Dwight VandenBerghe, Pentasoft Corporation, <dwight@pentasoft.com>
10 Oct 1997


"I really like the Amulet framework. I am using Amulet to develop a trace viewer as part of a CASE tool for software development in our lab here at HP. Since we develop code for both HP-UX and the NT environments, Amulet was a natural choice. Amulet's constraint model was ideal for this application. Thanks for all of your work!"
-- Todd Klaus, Electronic Commerce R&D, Hewlett-Packard Company, <tklaus@hpdtp.cup.hp.com>
31 Jul 97


"We are using ORE as the development language rather than C++. It is speeding up prototyping dramatically. The fact that interfacing with the graphics is seamless is, in this project, secondary. (Though of course the fact that we chose to use Amulet for the graphics is NOT!) ... Our experience with the gesture recognition algorithm supported by Amulet has resulted in a flowsheeting package that speeds up significantly that oh-most-onerous of CAD tasks, the drawing of the process flowsheet."
-- Ramachandran Lakshmanan, <rama@chemeng.ed.ac.uk> Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Edinburgh, UK
17 Jul 1997


"Thank you for making your library available, it looks to be very good quality and imaginative stuff. Coming from a Smalltalk/Actor background I find your dynamic objects particularly welcome, flexible and imaginative in the somewhat rigid C++ world."
-- John Carter, <ryent@lantic.co.za>
9 Jul 1997


"I must also say that I am completely amazed by this toolkit. It's very easy to use and powerful."
-- Garrett Mitchener, student working for the Duke University Computer Science Department. <wgm2@acpub.duke.edu>
2 Jul 1997


"I downloaded a copy of Amulet, and soon found my self dazzled by its beauty. At this point in time I am still some what of a novice user with access to a Sparc Ultra and gcc 2.7.0. However I am making rapid progress, aided by a computer science background and the accompanying documentation. By the way, so far, the on-line manual has been excellent. Just yesterday I wrote a non-trivial program using the Amulet library. I was quite pleased with the result, and the effort involved fewer lines of code than I had initially anticipated."
-- Darius Antia, 4th year Computer Science Student, York University, North York, Ont. <cs932009@red.ariel.cs.yorku.ca>
4 May 1997


"Bravo! I want to thank the Amulet team for such a great job. I'm just starting to realize how powerful Amulet is! Even for the C++ beginner that I am.... Keep on doing such a good job."
-- Max Lawson <mlawson@drfmc.ceng.cea.fr> French Atomic Energy Center (CEA)
21 Apr 1997


"I want to tell you what a wonderful experience it was getting Amulet 3. No major problems! It is VERY CLEAN! I was able to quickly and easily get the samples to work. I am a big fan. It is a very impressive alpha release.... Amulet, of course, is the key [to our development]. It far exceeds my fondest wishes in exactly the area of software that interests me. And it is with the cornerstone of Amulet that I can even attempt [our] project. At this phase of the company's growth, Amulet is my main business partner. So if there is anything I can do or say or help, I'm pleased to do whatever I can."
-- Bruce D. Kyle, Concord Communications, <concord@proaxis.com>
6 Mar 97


"As usual - I think you did a brilliant job! The Makefile worked without any (I repeat - WITHOUT ANY) mods - just 'threw' it on, said 'make' and off it went without any problems - what else can you ask! My life is almost too easy now. Without Amulet the user interface to our system would be far less advanced than it now is. The more we use Amulet the more it turns out to be a winner for us - we sometimes talk about the bad old times when we were still using OWL/MFC. From hindsight it almost seems we were using Assembler."
   -- 15 May 97
"Guys what should I say - brilliant! ... You guys have done a quite a decent job ;-) All the examples/tests we have tried so far run very stable. I like Gilt."
   -- 19 Feb 1997
-- Stephan Nebel, <stephan@florian.actrix.gen.nz>, Linkworks Ltd, Wellington, NZ


"I have followed the list for several months and evaluated Amulet a bit, so I'm really no Amulet-Guru. But it is amazing how good the support from you is for your users and how fast the development takes place. I have never seen such good quality in a research project (there are a lot of commercial companies which aren't able to give such a good support to their customers...)."
-- Robert M. Muench, SCRAP EDV-Anlagen GmbH, Karlsruhe, Germany, <r.m.muench+ieee.org>
18 Feb 97


"Congratulations on a fine release [of version 3.0]! Very impressive - seems speedier than before and the new build system makes it much easier to deal with.... Overall - it's brilliant! [The] Gilt [interactive interface builder] is a great addition to the samples, and the whole package has very good performance. I look forward to exploring further over the coming days."
-- Jon Wright, <jon@mycelium.com>, Mycelium Research
17 Feb 97


"We have definitely decided to use the Amulet development toolkit for our UNIX GUI product. We are very excited to find that such an awesome package exists. It turns out that there aren't very many GUI builder environments for HP UNIX that are good. And as it also turns out, Amulet is not only good, it is one of the few that are free. It isn't often that you get great software for free :)"
   -- 15 Nov 1996
"We are now almost entirely finished with our project. The AMULET project is one of the best supported, and most rapidly evolving pieces of software I have worked with. The product has far more rapid and thorough support than most (if not all) commercial packages I have used.... I am glad that I discovered your product and was able to successfully use it to develop our UNIX User Interface."
   -- 15 Feb 1997
-- Curtiss Murphy, <cmurphy@exis.net>, Appropriate Technologies, Inc.


"I was looking around for a portable and comfortable GUI tool. I have taken a look into V, Fresco, wxWindows, PENGUIN and was not conviced by them. Mainly too much trouble to install them. Amulet addresses the major target platforms I am interested in (Mac is a nice bonus), it uses C++ and the installation on Solaris was smooth."
-- Frank Freykamp <lion@uni-paderborn.de>, University of Paderborn, Germany.
24 Nov 1996


"Amulet's object model can be used in place of the C++ one at little expense. So: use directly the Amulet objects whenever you can, it usually results in the end with better performance than with C++ objects. (In other words: don't bother with stupid C++ objects when you can use intelligent Amulet ones. ;)"
-- Rodolphe Ortalo, <ortalo@laas.fr> Laboratoire d'Analyse et d'Architecture des Systèmes, France.
14 Nov 1996


"By the way: You can add my accolades to the Amulet comments. I'm really happy to have the tool for my classes. Makes my life so much better!"
-- Dr. Jo Perry, Computer Science Department, North Carolina State University
23 Oct 96


"I am very satisfied with Amulet. It is fast, very powerful, and the object model together with constraints makes it very well suited to building graphics applications. In fact, I have found again the pleasure of developing using these concepts. Thank you all for developing Amulet! :-) "
     23 Oct 1996
"You and your group have been doing a fantastic job and Amulet is certainly the coolest toolkit I know of."
     15 Dec 1997
-- Jean-Francis Balaguer, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland


"I am new to the Amulet world, which is as nice as described in [this] "Comments on Amulet" from users page, or even better! A lot of congradulations for your work, and thanks for this very coherent library."
-- Francis Klay, <klay@lannion.cnet.fr> Lannion, France
17 Sep 96.


"I've been coming up to speed on Amulet, and am very impressed (it almost seems like cheating!) ... I will be encouraging my class to give Amulet a try...."
-- David Kieras, AI Lab, E.E.& C.S. Dept., Univ. of Michigan,
22 Aug 1996.


"Congratulations for developing such a powerful software library ! ... I am now more and more convinced that Amulet is a really wonderful and powerful tool for software developers."
-- Olivier Michel, Universite de Nice Sophia Antipolis, France,
16 Aug 1996.


"Keep up the good work, Amulet is one of the nicest pieces of software I've seen! (Thanks!)"
-- Arne Olav Morken, Neureka ANS, Norway,
15 Jul 1996


"Please accept my compliments once more on Amulet -- I have never programmed using constraints before, but am finding it straightforward and fun using Amulet."
-- Simon D. Levy, CS Dept, University of Tennessee,
9 Jul 1996


"With Amulet it was the first time for me to program a window in X11. I also added a menu bar and buttons. The funny thing is that I know only very little about C++ and X11. Therefore: Thank you, nice work, I like it, applications for public release to come this year!!!"
-- Roland Rehmet, Technical University, Munich, Germany,
14 Mar 96.


"Our group picked Amulet as a cheap (free!) way of getting a user interface done, and are finding it remarkably useful and easy to use."
-- Danyel A. Fisher, CS Dept, Washington Univ. of St. Louis,
13 Mar 1996.


"I'd like to tell you that you did a great work on Amulet and that I am really impressed by the flexibility and expressive power of this toolkit. Well, it is really COOL..."
-- Gabor Herr, CS Dept, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany,
20 Dec 1995.


"I had a look at the docs and ran some code and have to say this is a nice toolkit, powerful and easy to understand. Congratulations."
-- Martin Cracauer, Hanse Networking e.V., Norderstedt/Hamburg, Germany,
15 Jun 95.


"My students have found that the documentation is very good and that they can get started using Amulet fairly quickly."
-- Brad Vander Zanden, CS Dept, University of Tennessee,
20 Jul 95.


"My first impression is that I would like to say WOW!!

I really like Amulet, I used Garnet for the last two years, and in comparison Amulet is easier to learn and more friendly. I especially loved the power of the `Inspector.'"
-- Kasem Abotel, AI Lab, E.E.& C.S. Dept., Univ. of Michigan,
17 Apr 1995.


Back to the Amulet Home Page.


Maintained by:
Brad Myers (last updated 20-Mar-97)