Homebrew PCBs

Hi Leon

>I tried Autotrax out of curiosity and found it unusable! It was very slow 
>and had lots of bugs.

As mentioend, I did not intensively looked at it. However there is a
user e-mail list and the autor - although being "just one" seems to be
fairly wiling in addressing issues. 

> I think it's been improved, but now costs money.

I just looked, it's still free. The only thing they charge for (as far
as I can see) is the printed manual. 

> The 
>developer (there's only one of him) seems to have got the users of the free 
>product to do his debugging for him. Micro$oft has been doing something like 
>this for years, of course.

I don't have trouble at all to trust a product made by only one person
though. IMHO this is not the key criterion - especially not if you
look at M$ cause aparently their teams consist of more than one
people. I of course can't (and don't want) comment on the stability of
autotrax. Bad to hear that it's aparently not there where it should. I
also I found other capture and layout software that was comercial and
extremly buggy. I do apreciate the fact that Eagle works stable and so
far was able to do what I want. In other words I haven't regretted the
money I spent on it. I don't like Eagles UI though (especially the non
standard editor is something to get used to)

>I use Pulsonix, BTW: http:/www.pulsonix.com. It's excellent, but fairly 
>expensive.

I'm sure the old fact "you get what you pay for" holds especially true
here too.

Markus