Upcoming Beta Release: SQL Converter 2 for Excel

Monday, July 25, 2005

There is nothing quite like the exhilaration from lack of sleep and high levels of caffeine present during a marathon coding week. Fortunately, I am able to take my time this week preparing SQL Converter 2.0 for Excel for beta release. The core program is functioning well and I have spent the last day wrestling with Windows Installer issues.

From a developer perspective, building object oriented software in VBA for Excel is a pain. From a users perspective, the new version has:

A much improved interface for managing tables
Access to all columns (A - IV) in Excel
New wizard to help design SQL tables from the header row
Support for long field names, including spaces

I hope to have a public download available within the week.

Posted by Frank Rietta at 7:04 PM 0 comments links to this post

Less is more! Google offers less "talk".

Thursday, July 21, 2005

Yesterday I was visiting my grandmother, who had recently purchased a new computer and wanted to use the Internet. The person who had helped her install her computer had set her up with Juno because it was free. However, my grandmother found it impossible to use because it was too visually distracting. She wanted access to a few things including e-mail, IM, and maps. She and I changed her dial-up service to that provided by her local phone company and then registered a gmail.com account and changed her default homepage to google.com.

Gmail is one of the nicest e-mail interfaces I have ever seen from a usability standpoint. It beats all of the web mail interfaces hands down and even most of the desktop clients. The biggest problem with e-mail programs today is that there are too many small buttons. It is nearly impossible for someone like my grandmother to use them. Gmail is clean cut and uses discrete advertising that does not distract from the task at hand.

I hope more companies learn from Google and forgo the horrible flash animations, animated gifs that blink, and other antiquated advertisement techniques. Plain, well-placed, discrete information can be seen as helpful and not distracting. Simple layouts with less clutter will greatly improve the user experience.

I really like the Royal Bank of Scotland’s advertisements of "Less talk." It is the same principle that Google appears to be using with great success. I can only hope that the software and Internet industries mature and apply the same principles.

Posted by Frank Rietta at 1:40 PM 0 comments links to this post

WinZIP sold and needs technical improvements.

Monday, July 18, 2005

Henk on sharewareblogs.com is reporting that WinZIP has been sold to Vector Capital, which is the company that owns Corel, JASC, and Real Networks. I hope Nico Mak and company received the appropriate compensation for their years of work.

Only time will tell if the new owners do more than just change some icons and increase the price for the WinZIP software. I hope they improve the performance on B2ZIP and GZIP compressed TAR files so that decompression can go on-the-fly. Currently WinZIP writes the new ZIP file to a temp file and then copies it to the final destination. However, this is very inefficient when archiving a very large home directory to a USB storage device. There should be an option to have WinZIP write directly to the destination file without creating a intermediate temporary file.

Posted by Frank Rietta at 8:39 AM 0 comments links to this post

Vector Graphics and Icon Licenses

Sunday, July 17, 2005

I have been working on a few applications in the last year but noticed that they look out of date compared to most new applications. The problem is that I have been using the Visual Studio icon set or leaving buttons and menu items without a graphic. Microsoft has been shipping the same sample icons since at least Visual Basic 3.0. Needless to say the state of art for icons and other computer images has advanced since 1993. As I personally have very little artistic skill I had to start looking for more modern looking graphics.

Considering I use FreeBSD quite a bit I, of course, started playing around the KDE and Gnome icons but ran into a license roadblock as those graphic elements are licensed under the GPL. The applications I am developing will be distributed under another license so I am precluded from using these particular icons. It does not appear particularly clear how one should go about licensing these images from the original authors under an alternate agreement. I wonder how this might make developing non-GPL software for Gnome and KDE which blends in nicely with the other applications within the environment. Some icons are licensed under LGPL but a lot are GPL.

After looking around for companies that sell icon sets for what I consider reasonable prices (somewhere less than $50), I found quite a bit of variation. In the end I bought a copy of Susan Pichotta’s Roma set (www.aceicons.com). The primary reason I chose to go with this particular set is that I looks reasonable and I know the artist through the ASP and AISIP. As I get further along I might have to see if Sue will be willing to create a few specific icons in the same style as the set but the new artwork has already helped spruce up the look of my applications.

Posted by Frank Rietta at 6:04 PM 2 comments links to this post

Back home in Georgia

Saturday, July 16, 2005

I am back home and more or less adjusted back to Eastern Standard Time. I really enjoyed the study abroad experience in Barcelona, Spain. I managed to take a camping trip to Montserrat, a camping trip to the Pyrenees in Southern France, and even a weekend trip to London. I particularly enjoyed walking around the city and enjoying the sights, sounds, and food. While I by no means became particularly fluent in Spanish, I did manage to get pretty good at shopping, dealing with numbers and prices, and even picked up some social niceties in both Castilian and Catalan.

As my wallet was stolen in the first month of the trip, I had to get a new drivers’ license and student ID printed. I find it somewhat humorous that the student ID reprint costs 3 times more than the drivers’ license. I also got the necessary professor permission and permits to take a 1 hour graduate seminar class in order to be a full time student in the fall without taking so many classes that I do not do well in my final semester.

Now it is time to get back to work.

Posted by Frank Rietta at 10:20 AM 0 comments links to this post

Hello Pictures

Sunday, July 10, 2005

I wanted to test the image upload capability in Blogger. This kitten belongs to Neus, who helped Jay, Imran, and I out with our software internationalization metaphor project. Neus lives in small town called Palautordera, which is about an hour train ride outside of Barcelona.

I am currently working on my final paper. It is time to get back to work.

Posted by Frank Rietta at 9:13 AM 0 comments links to this post

To London and Back

Monday, July 04, 2005

I went to London this last weekend and thoroughly enjoyed the trip. The GBP is very strong against the EURO and USD so getting around for three days ended up costing a little more than the EasyJet flight. The weather was wonderful this weekend, never getting above 22 degrees (about 70 F). The heat and humidity in Barcelona hit me hard when I exited the airport here. The pictures from the trip are posted.

Posted by Frank Rietta at 4:25 PM 0 comments links to this post