Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Quantrix
In an earlier post I mentioned Lighthouse Design. After Lotus stopped developing Improv on NeXT, Lighthouse came out with a very similar product called Quantrix. I never got a chance to play with it but the screenshots and feature set looked like they had cloned Improv. The original Lighthouse Design applications for NeXTstep including Quantrix can be downloaded from here. Of course you'll also need to find a working NeXT system to try them out.
There's newer company that's called Quantrix. Their CTO was one of the original Lighthouse developers. Quantrix has developed a new product called Quantrix Modeler. It's written in Java and runs on Windows and Mac OS X. It's also very similar to Improv. Even their formula language syntax is the same (or very similar). They're going after the "financial and quantitative modeling" market so it's more expensive than basic office productivity software.
I exchanged email with Quantrix's QA and Support manager, Mike Salisbury. The trademark on Quantrix had expired so they were able to use it. Sun didn't have any objections to what they were doing. They also have a patent license agreement with IBM for the multidimensional concepts in Improv. The patent is here. When I get some free time I'd like to give Quantrix a try.
There's newer company that's called Quantrix. Their CTO was one of the original Lighthouse developers. Quantrix has developed a new product called Quantrix Modeler. It's written in Java and runs on Windows and Mac OS X. It's also very similar to Improv. Even their formula language syntax is the same (or very similar). They're going after the "financial and quantitative modeling" market so it's more expensive than basic office productivity software.
I exchanged email with Quantrix's QA and Support manager, Mike Salisbury. The trademark on Quantrix had expired so they were able to use it. Sun didn't have any objections to what they were doing. They also have a patent license agreement with IBM for the multidimensional concepts in Improv. The patent is here. When I get some free time I'd like to give Quantrix a try.
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