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User Experience and Development Productivity

After reading several posts on User Experience on www.uniface.info I could not resist writing down my opinion on User Experience and Productivity in Uniface.

Read it here

New sample in Japanese

It was very strange for me to see my work suddenly in a Japanese version. The command button sample on www.uniface.info is now also available in that language.

Thanks to:

• Kazuyoshi - Translating
• Junya - Proof reading
• Michael - Artwork

Click the picture to go to the sample:

(The road to) Uniface 9.6 Samples

Long introduction
My involvement with Uniface started when I worked at KLM Engineering and Maintenance and we decided to move away from the Wang VS platform and the BASIC programming language and we were looking for the best 4GL and the best RDBMS. After a Proof of Concept with multiple 4GL's and RDBMS'ses we chose Uniface and Oracle. And I did not have have RSI anymore from banging out hundreds of lines of code every day.

After eight years of KLM I decided that I wanted to see more companies and meet more people. So I joined Ordina which at that time had a very active unit that provided Uniface services. I worked for a lot of companies and did everything you can do in a Uniface related projects. From programming to designing to testing to project management. After another eight years there was a big recession in the IT world and along with many other colleagues I got fired.

Since there was not a single job available in IT, and I could not sit at home all the time, I worked as a workshop receptionist for a car dealer for a while.

Luckily every recession has an end and I got a new job at Compuware. In the Services department I started to work for Uniface customers again. It was great visiting so many customers in so many countries. But I saw that many customers were not using Uniface to the full extent, so I started putting up little samples on this blog.

After a couple of years it was time to look at Uniface from yet another angle. Two months ago I transferred to the Uniface Lab.

And that brings us to the Uniface 9.6 Samples:
The first thing I was asked to do in the Lab was to make official samples for the new GUI features of Uniface 9.6. That is why it has been a bit quiet on this blog. It was a very nice challenge, because in this role I was one of the very first people that could actually build something with Uniface 9.6. And since 9.6 was not completely finished when I started I also found some bugs so at least there are a few less for you to run into :-)

You can see the results on www.uniface.info/samples.

More samples will become available there soon. At first only the 9.6 GUI samples will be on the website and all other samples are still distributed with the Uniface product. But over time we want all samples to be on the website so it is easier for you to get them and easier for us to make new (versions) of samples.

I hope you like them. Please feel free to contact me if you see room for improvement, or would like to see a sample for a specific topic. If it is something small I can still post it here, otherwise I can direct your request towards the decision makers.

Get your kicks with Uniface 9.6 !

Alternative Version Control Solution for Uniface

The Uniface ecosystem is supported by more companies than just Compuware.

There is an alternative solution for version management / source code management available from March Hare. Have a look at www.march-hare.com to see if this can be useful to you.

I just had a conversation with March Hare’s product manager Arthur Barrett. It was good to exchange our ideas on the future and to talk about old times too.

Date picker for Uniface 9.6

In Uniface 9.6 it will be really easy to implement a Date Picker widget.

A Date Picker is a date field with a little icon. When you press the icon a calendar appears. Uniface has this widget available for web development in Dynamic Server Pages. For Windows Forms there is no Date Picker widget. Uniface does however have a Calender widget. And Uniface 9.6 Popup Forms are introduced. Combine the two and you have the full Date Picker functionality.

Uniface 9.6: billions of buttons

I really need to stop playing with the new Uniface buttons... In Uniface 9.6 you can create "billions" of buttons by specifying an icon that goes on top of the button and four images that represent the button in its four states. Also different text colors for the four states and gradient background color possible. PNG support makes using transparent images easier. No more need to paint both a label and a button if you want both text and icon on a button!

1. Classic Uniface button with gradient color.
2. Classic Uniface button with icon and internalized label.
3. Classic Uniface button with icon and text in field value.
4. Image button.
5. Image button with text.
6. Image button with icon.
7. Image button with icon. Text from internalized label.
8. Image button with both icon and text in field value.
9. Windows button.
10. Windows Header button.