ThoughtsOnThinking

Object Pascal for Visual Studio or Mono

Hey Caetano, I finally replied to your comment.  [You can say things like this when only six people read your blog... (grin)].  But if you're still feeling nostalgic to take Object Pascal out for a spin again on a nice sunny day, maybe you should download this and drive it around the block (or two).    : )

Which tool to use for Windows applications

I was just thinking today about how, in general, I think three things are vastly underrated when it comes choosing a language / IDE for applicattion development (especially shrinkwrap software, and especially for the small / micro-ISV): 

1) The availability of a deep and  rich "toolbox" of components, widgets, and the like (i.e. being able to buy rather than write, which allows you to focus on "inventing rocket ships," rather than "reinventing wheels" (...or worse, refining your own metal))

2) Both the immense a) value, and b) cost of (in terms of time that must be invested) familiarity with those tools in the toolbox.  So often I hear people discount the language choice issue because "it's just a matter of syntax."  Learning syntax (and  familiarity with one's own tools) takes time.... and time is way more than just money...

3) Having the raw source code for every single component / widget you use, and using a language that gives you the ability to take that "toolbox" and extend to wherever you need it to go (the sky's the limit).

Anwyay, came across this just now, and it spurred the thoughts all over again: What language to use for Windows application development.

Enjoy the Madness

Hey Christopher, maybe you can unwind post-op with this:

Q. What do you mean by “copy”?
A. Ummm…copy the contents of the file to a new file.
Q. What about the date/time stamps?
A. No, those don’t need to be copied.
Q. Does the result file have to have the same name?
A. No.
Q. Can it have the same name?
A. Umm…no.
Q. Do I have to worry about name spoofing? What about the Turkish I?
A. Don’t worry about that.
Q. Does it have to be in the same location? Note that if it is in the same location, it (probably) can’t have the same name. Unless you copy it to itself (another question…).
A. Yes....

(...read the rest here... the amusement is worth every second...)

PDF Printers / Creation Tools, and a Somewhat Related But Subdued UI Rant

I think of all of the Joel On Software posts I've read, this little snippet, along a few others from this post, is one of my favorites.  It captures, for me, the essense of why I am generally so reticent to "follow the lemmings" off the "our app has to look and act just like Microsoft Office" cliff:

When Microsoft Excel 3.0 came out in 1990, it was the first application to sport a new feature called a toolbar. It was a sensible feature, people liked it, and everybody copied it -- to the point that it's unusual to see an application without one any more.

The toolbar was so successful that the Excel team did field research using a special version of Excel which they distributed to a few people; this version kept statistics on what the most frequently used commands were and reported them back to Microsoft. For the next version, they added another row of toolbar buttons, this time containing the most frequently used commands. Great.

The trouble was, they never got around to disbanding the toolbar team, who didn't seem to know when to leave good enough alone. They wanted you to be able to customize your toolbar. They wanted you to be able to drag the toolbar anywhere on the screen. Then, they started to think about how the menu bar is really just a glorified toolbar with words instead of icons, so they let you drag the menu bar anywhere you wanted on the screen, too.  Customizability on steroids. Problem: nobody cares! I've never met anyone who wants their menu bar anywhere except at the top of the window.

It seems that no matter where you live, what is "fashionable" comes to take over what is "useful and effective" yet still beautiful.  I was struck recently, while looking at this house (which is now almost 60 years old), by how timeless original design can be.  A few weeks ago, in stark contrast, I came across this site, and was equally struck at how pathetic fashion extremes can be, twenty or thirty years after the fact.

Shag carpet.  Acoustic ceilings.  Pebble-and-epoxy flooring.  Corian.  Granite countertops.  Pretty much just pick your date, and watch their popularity expire.

That's kind of just the way fashion is.

But excellent design?  That's timeless.  The Porsche 911.  The standard paperclip (do you know how many variations there have been on that?  But the one design we all know has remained "timeless" for quite some time).  The classic architecture of, say, a 1910's bungalow.

The thing is, things that work can be beautiful, and things that are functionally beautiful, almost inherently become timeless.

So I guess that's the little nerve in me that gets struck somewhat frequently, but I was thinking about it again tonight, because i was thinking about Adobe Acrobat.

I first used Adobe Acrobat, the full version, back with version 3.0.  The PDF Writer was beautifully efficient and straightforward.  There was little to complexify about the interface.  I think I could even search and find what I needed inside the various PDF files.

Well, tonight I had a real-estate person try to send me a lease agreement over the Internet, and their little instant-contract application sent it out as a straight proprietary-format, not-readable-unless-you-install-the-viewer file.  I managed to find the viewer OK, but decided to educate the person a bit on how they might make that easier for the next person. 

So I went looking for Adobe Acrobat.  $279 on PC Connection.  Ouch.  That's a bit more than I think "creating a PDF" is probably worth to this person.  ...and to be perfectly frank, I'm not even sure how easy Acrobat makes creating a PDF anymore -- last I remember, the process was getting more complex, not less.  The simplicity of PDF Writer got lost somewhere along the way.  (BTW - anyone tried this?  Tell me what you think about it.)

So, I decided to do a quick search for alternative solutions.  Found these:

• CutePDF
• DeskPDF
• PrimoPDF
• PDF995

Haven't tried any of them, but they look fairly promising.

Has anyone else noticed how complex the once-simple-and-intuitive Acrobat Reader has become?... (...or is it just me?)   I used to be able to just pop open a PDF and read the darn thing.  Now I feel like I'm firing off a new IIS catalog index every time I load it.  Crazy.

SO, there are my software finds for the evening; let me know if you find or now of any great simple PDF creation apps out there, preferrably that work as a straight printer driver, and better yet are totally free.  If you try out one of the above and like it (or DON'T like it), let me know -- I've not actually tried any of them yet. 

But lastly, a question... or maybe two:

Check out, say, Firefox 1.5 on Windows XP: Who decided that having toolbar buttons only look like "buttons" when the mouse is over them, and why is that becoming the UI standard these days?  (Not to throw rocks at glass houses; I've got some apps with this look too). 

...and, is this shag carpet, or timeless design?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Digital Artisans Redux

From the Lamenting That My Life Should Be Different (but not doing anything about it) department:

Quote from "My Job Went To India":

When my wife and I moved to Bangalore, I was expecting to find likeminded technologists with a passion for learning. I was expecting a vibrant after-work life of user group meetings and deep, philosophical discussions on software development methodologies and techniques. I was expecting to find India's Silicon Valley bursting at its seams with a an overlow of artsians, enthusiastic in the pursuit of the great craft of software development.

What I found were a whole lot of people who were picking up a paycheck and a few incredibly passionate craftspeople.

Just like back home.

OneNote and "Blackhole software"

Digging through files on hard drive tonight, I came across a folder of OneNote files, and once again found myself lamenting the "black hole software" phenomenon.  (Last time was here).   (...and just for the record, Chris Pratley (reader: see the comments on the very first link in this post), I was (and still am) one of those people who doesn't use OneNote precisely because it is blackhole software.. <g>).

Does anyone know if OneNote has fleshed out the API any further at this point, and / or made it easier to get to the OneNote data?  Basically what I'm after is being able to get an any and all single notes, separately.

Aesthetics and Construction

Makes me think of UI design in software:

It is time now to reevaluate the once-horrifying statement of John Ruskin that architecture is the decoration of construction, but we should append the warning of Pugin: It is all right ot decorate construction but never construct decoration.

        Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegass (via Tufte's Envisioning Information)

Virtual Development Environment

One of the things that makes Delphi such a powerful (in my opinion) development environment, is its component framework.  Where this technology really pays off is not so much in the initial out-of-the-box component set that comes with Delphi (though that is nice); it's in how easily it can be added to, via customizing/inheritance, from-scratch creation, or the purchase of third-party components.

Over time, this can get built up into quite an "arsenal" -- because it's code designed for re-use that actually gets re-used. ; )   Instead of coding everything from scratch, you get to focus on the unique attributes of the application you are developing, using and extending your component library along the way, which then puts more tools into your always-there toolchest... a virtuous circle with wonderful momentum.  (I say "always-there toolchest," btw, because one thing I've observed in many other environments is how often intended-for-re-use code lies dormant in in some repository somewhere). 

The downside of all this, though, is that re-installing a built-over-years component library into Delphi's IDE can take a huge amount of time.  It's literally not unlike having to do a full, manual format-and-reinstall of your day-to-day Windows PC, with lots of little details and nits that can get in the way. 

The other downside of the component library is that if you don't know what your doing, it's pretty easy to break things if you are installing new component packages that are finicky about installations sequences, or search paths, or whatever.

SO, those two things in mind...  a little over a year ago, when I bought a new laptop and made it my primary dev box (I like being able to code anywhere), I decided to try out setting up a virtual "development box" in VMWare, that would just be for development work -- no other installs polluting the mix over time.

It's worked out great, and my little digital dev environs have stayed quite clean over the past year.  No regrets. 

The beauty of it, though, was when I did a full wipe/restore on the whole laptop a few weeks ago (sped up considerably via Ghost).  My entire "development computer" had been copied off as a single file to an external USB drive prior to the format/restore, and once I had my laptop's OS and VMWare up and going, all I had to do was copy that virtual machine file over, and I was back in business.  Worked like a charm...

I have a feeling this "virtual develolpment environment" is going to be a semi-permanent thing.  : )

 

INI vs. XML vs. Registry... and if the former... stored WHERE?

I came across this today on the ECCO Pro mailing list:

Every Windows program can be customized - whether it's which icons you choose to put on the toolbar, or the boxes you check or uncheck in Tools/Options.  But if you move to a new machine you have to re-set pretty much all of those customizations manually.  (Yes, MS offers a "Save Your Settings" wizard for Office, but it doesn't get everything.)

Ecco is one of the few programs that does this (the three
C:\windows\ecco.* files).  And Macs, of course, have Preference files for each program.  You just save the Preference file, move it to the new machine and presto, it's set up just like it was on the old machine.  For the life of me, I don't know why every Windows program doesn't emulate that, but they don't.

For a long time, I kept copious notes of how I customized every program, and all the choices I made, and now I do it with Print
Screen: I take screenshots of all the Options boxes as a record of how to set the program up if I ever have to re-install it.

My question is this: is there some faster way of doing this?  Some 3rd party software that saves all these preferences?  I'm jsut about to wipe the hard drive and re-load everything, and it would save me a ton of time if there a way to load preferences when I re-load all the programs.

I've often wondered this, as I migrate to a new machine, or reformat an existing one.  Once, while migrating just Outlook Express e-mail messages to a new computer (forget the mail accounts or preferences), I thought to myself "How do people who don't mess with computers all day DO this?..."  (i.e. your data is most conveniently stored here: C:\Documents and Settings\Cass\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{2D4188F4-F51D-4A92-945C-1B7BA0FBD4AD}\Microsoft\Outlook Express ....uhm... yeah....)

Same deal with the Windows Registry.  Migrating little bits of it from one machine to another (for  instance, "give me all keys and preference settings for this one program" is ridiculously obtuse and complex.   And then, of course, individual user profiles add to that complexity (should this setting be saved per-user, or application-wide?). 

As a user, in general, I lean towards a "preferences file," stored somewhere I can easily find it and copy it.   As a developer, I find myself wondering 1) what the "official Windows standard" is for such things (is there one?), and 2) if I should even bother following it.  (...which, of course, gets at the very root of the problem -- non-standardized application development). 

(...which brings this up:)  I'd find it interesting too to know more about how the Mac seems to successfully enforce such things on developers who target that platform.  i.e. my perception is that one of the Mac biggest strengths is consistency.   Contrasting, say, to Windows apps -- have you ever noticed, for instance, how much even the simplest "save file" dialog varies from app to app on Windows?   In the Windows Vista video, they touch on that specific dialog, and I found myself asking, "Yes, but will developers actually use it?"