Studio 6.1 method lines increased to 256K

[Geir Fjærli]

I am tempted to point out that Omnis always have been «lagging behind» on some technologies when trying to catch up on others. Example: All the work spent on SQL connectivity for Omnis 7, which had the numerous developers that were still on the native DML (some still are) ask why and point to their pet enhancement requests. I actually went to Mitford once in the early Studio days with a list of wishes from Scandinavian developers. Many of them was things they could not do in Omnis 7, that they still could not do in Studio, and which made them (rightly so?) refuse to upgrade their apps. Remember the informal list poll once which indicated that what many developers wanted was a new Omnis Lite, which could best be described as Omnis 5 with all the window controls from Studio. So no OO, no SQL.

Going back even further in time developers were split between those who wanted a compiler to speed up runtime execution, and those who wanted Mitford to catch up to 4D on «sexiness». 

My long lost and forgotten Omnis Studio wish list was 13 pages long. many of which I am sure are still outstanding. I have long since realized that Mitford cannot do 13 pages of smaller wishes and ever get around to the bigger ones. And I am glad I am not the one to make those priorities.

I am also beginning to think I am glad that they do prioritize new technologies after all. It might not help all (I have clients that I have now retired from still on Omnis 7), and it won’t help me, but I think it is necessary they do this lest Omnis retire with me…

Yes, there are other superior products out there for creating web apps. but I am not sure that is an argument for advicing the Mitford cobblers to stick to their last. While some may be wearing their original footwear, there might not be much of a future demand for it.

I remember working on a project for a Norwegian insurance company in the Omnis 7.3 days when a corporate policy decision mandated all applications to be web based. We derided the idea, partly of course because web based solutions was not yet up to the task, but partly because nothing at the time suggested Omnis would be. So I remember us saying stuff to management like «Web based apps will never satisfy corporate standards.» Famous last words, even if it took the company years to get there. What I should have done was go to Mitford and say «What about that web stuff».

I guess the sad fact eventually was that I myself could not keep up with the new technologies, and therefore focused on the things I thought I knew. I envied the likes of Clifford and other who seemed to grasp all that new stuff. Eventually, by taking on «safe» projects rather than challenging myself I ended up in a sad circle.

Now I have all the time in the world to learn new stuff, but nowhere to use it. My next hobby is learning Swift. Wherever i lay my hat, that's my home…

Geir :)

7. aug. 2014 kl. 15:26 skrev Bastiaan Olij <bastiaan at basenlily.me>:

> Hi Marten,
> 
> Owh I'm not underestimating the things they did add into 5, though you
> name a few that I believe were already available in 4. But they aren't
> substantial enough improvements to warrant the version change. The focus
> has clearly been on the javascript client for the last two versions,
> that is were the major work and improvements have been made.
> 
> Whether that was a smart choice, I don't know. There are some really
> good products out there for building web applications and more and more
> are added to the list every day some of which have a feature set Omnis
> pales by. Many of these, especially the open source ones, have legions
> of developers tinkering away at them at a rate TL can never hope to keep
> up with. I've recently been playing around with Ruby on Rails and been
> very impressed with how fast we can put things together, others on the
> list here have been very successful moving to Django. I've just started
> playing around with jQT which is a Javascript library for building
> mobile apps that have a look and feel close to what you would expect on
> a smartphone.
> 
> The 64bit and Cocoa upgrade, I do not envy TL here. I'm probably
> underestimating both the workload and the benefit of making Studio 64bit
> but the move to Cocoa is substantial I'm certain and one which after all
> the work is done, only shows most improvements under the surface. I do
> hope they take the opportunity when doing so to introduce a bunch of new
> controls.
> 
> We can only wait and see, maybe they will pull something nice out of
> their hats at EurOmnis. I do hope so because like you, I love this
> product deeply, even with it lagging behind other tools and seemly
> needing a little TLC that its been short of in the last few years. Omnis
> still has a few strong points that I have not found in any other
> development tool, the strongest of which allowing me to build
> application far faster then I've been able to do in any other environment. 
> 
> Enough ranting :)
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Bas
> 
> On 7/08/14 9:08 PM, Marten Verhoeven wrote:
>> Hi Bastiaan,
>> 
>> We had enough reasons to go to Studio 5 and 6 as there were lots of useful small improvements. Dragging to reorder headed list columns, Unicode support, more method lines, content tips, vertical center text (in fields), performance analysis, better localization, maximum of 400 list columns removed, $norefresh and Worker DAMs. This last one is absolutely the best new feature in at least five years. It enabled me to build a completely different user interaction and I really hope they provide more of those worker objects. 
> 
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