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Update: Panorama for Mac OS X

ProVue were a bit slow releasing a PowerPC version of Panorama and they were slow releasing a Mac OS X version as well, now they are really slow releasing an Intel version! I think maybe the development environment and legacy code might be slowing down progress a bit (Panorama is based on OverVue which was around in the really early days of the Mac). The Mac OS X version doesn't seem to have a lot of new features - the main advantage is getting the flexibility and speed of Panorama without having to use the Classic environment. It would be nice to have the same advantage on Intel Macs. Panorama is also a bit expensive at US$300 and the registration procedure is a bit tedious.

Panorama

Panorama is a unique product by ProVue Development. I haven't seen anything else like it on the Mac or any other platform. It is a RAM-based database manager but offers a lot of the sophistication of fully-featured disk-based database managers, including...

Relational functions, ability to cross-link, look-up etc between files.
Very comprehensive macro language, custom forms, dialog, menus, etc.
Built-in graphing, graphics, sound, movies, etc.
Very fast searching, sorting, calculations on any field (not just those that are indexed, indexing doesn't exist in RAM-based database manager really - everything is indexed).
Compact data storage, fast disk access (loading/saving the file only, no other disk access required) For example when converting a file from a disk-based database to Panorama the other program took over an hour to export the data that Panorama took 19 seconds to load!
Limited multi-user access (only one writer, remember this is a RAM-based program, it's not so easy to make a RAM-based database multi-user!)

Like all the programs I advocate on these pages I have no connection with the manufacturers and recommend these products solely on how useful I found them for work done for my clients and myself.

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