Movable Type is here. And so is the mandatory payment. The free edition will be limited, which for a lot of users is the understatement of the year. Read the comments to this post and decide if you want to stick with MT, or move along to something that remains free. Like b2evolution for example.
Yesterday I installed the trial version of WPTools for Delphi 6. Dudez, this thing rocks! By dropping 4 (yes, four) of their components on a frame, you more or less have a full-blown Wordprocessor (not only a text-editor). Fonts, alignments, rulers, images, tables, whatever, it’s there.
The native format of the edit-component is RTF, but by including WPWordConv in the uses-clause, the open-file-dialog lists all the file-formats that you have installed on your PC. So you cannot build a Word replacement if you don’t have Word installed (since it needs the Word DLL’s to convert to RTF).
Apart from this tiny drawback, this thing rocks! Oh, I already mentioned that.
I will be using this component in a tool I’m writing for a client that uses an application that generates RTF-reports/documents based on templates. But TRichView that I used, can’t handle the header and footer properly (the header contains a table and an image, which I think is not so special) and it does something to the gridlines of a table. In the application, they can view the generated RTF-file, but they requested that they could edit it as well, so they wouldn’t have to switch to the full-blown application everytime. Because of the quirks of TRichView, I created a button to start MS Word to edit the document. But if I give them the new version with the WPTools components, they will never have to use Word again. Great!
You can call it at least a little vain, Allen’s new blogtitle. But the restyling looks great. Keep it up, Allen.
After releasing WiX to the public (permalink), Microsoft has now released WTL, the Windows Template Library, to SourceForge as Open Source as well. Although it is a set of C++ libraries, the initiative should appeal to other developers as well.
Getting started with WTL
A comparison between WTL and MFC
“Old” 7.1 download from Microsoft
What a crazy week this turns out to be. My three months old nephew just got back from the hospital, where he was for an acute meningitis. He doesn’t seem to have any lasting damage (insert praise to your favorite god or god-like being here).
Yesterday we got a call from W’s younger sister: her second baby is born, but about 7 weeks to soon. He only weighs about 2100 grams. Being born in such an early stage, the baby’s lungs are not what they should be, so after a couple of hours the little guy was put on oxygen. He’s transferred to the Radboud in Nijmegen, one of the best hospitals for these kind of problems.
Let’s hope the grows up to be a strong and healthy boy, but for the next couple of days all we can do is wait.
Please have a look at these components. When I look at the sample Delphi code found in the FAQ, I can’t help but thinking: why is this company selling something that’s already present in Delphi? Why do we need a Word or an Excel component? It’s already there in the “Servers” tab. Geez…
What I was looking for was something in the line of RichView (that I have licensed). RichView doesn’t handle headers and footers in RTF/Word documents very well, so I was looking for something else. WPTools seems to do the trick very well, but being a small company, €225 is a lot of money if you don’t know if it will pay for itself. Especially since I already bought TRichView.
Any comments?
Is anyone out there using FireFly? Reading about it, it seems like a great piece of software, but I had never heard of it before. Anybody?
Nick blogs about InterBase. He’s fond of it. And so should you be, according to Nick. He points to an article by Bill Todd that compares InterBase 7.1 to MySQL. Of course InterBase is the winner in the article, but in the comparison of features the PRICE of Borland’s InterBase is left out of the equation. MySQL costs next to nothing: a pro-license is US$440. Interbase has more features (the comparison was done right) but it is licensed on a per-user basis. Unlimited users will cost you about US$4000. If you want to start small, say 20 users, it will still cost you about US$2000. MySQL + online backup option (price taken from the article) ~= 440 + 1150 = 1590.
How about putting that into the equation guys??? Lot’s of people choosing MySQL do that because they don’t need a hot-backup and they want to use a fast RDBMS for free. Since you don’t HAVE to buy a pro license. With InterBase you MUST buy a license.
There’s a new version of the Distribute.NET client: 489b. It allows for the new OGR-runs to be calculated. Go to the client download page to find the client for your OS. I’m in Team 1070, if you’re interested.
Novell will release its Connector for MS Exchange to the public, as Open Source. Read all about it in their press release (which seems to be under a lot of Slashdot-stress now :>>).