These notes by
Glenn Lawrence © 1997Announcements - Q&A Session - Discussion forum - Close
ADUG web development team:
The ADUG web development team met for the first time last week and is now actively
progressing development for the ADUG web site.
Graham Bashford is working on an on-line application form, Paul Spain and Keith Latham are
working on an on-line skills and experience database and Eric Gunstone is working on a
sign-in facility so that we can have a members only section. Thanks guys!
Other Aduggers interested in this development are welcome to join in. You will need to be able to contribute some time, but in return you will be learning valuable new skills, and gain some valuable CV enhancing experience to boot!
Insurancewatch web site:
ADUG member Wally Ripper has created an innovative and highly successful web site at www.insurancewatch.com.au that provides
interactive comparisons for personal insurance. Wally is supporting the ADUG web
development team with advice and access to the techniques he has researched for this
project. Team members have been to Wally's office in South Melbourne to talk to his
programmers there and learn what it is all about. Thanks Wally!
Developer Information Library (DIL):
The UK Borland User Group (a commercial group run by Richplum Ltd) is offering a
CD-based subscription service entitled "Developer Information Library" which
appears to be a knowledge base that extends on Mike Oriss's DTOPICS. The offer is open to
user groups only and the idea is for them to on-sell subscriptions to the library. The
cost of a yearly subscription (4 cds) to the group is $US35 with the idea that members are
to be charged $US70 plus delivery thus returning a profit to the group.
Since the ADUG is in pretty good financial shape I'm not too interested in the profit motive, nor am I swayed by the added incentive that the president gets a freebie copy, but if members think it is of value I would be happy to look at organising subscriptions for them at cost price.
I was concerned that it appeared that the subscription CDs were going to be time-bombed, but I have since received news that this isn't the case, only the two demo CDs will expire. This means that it is perhaps something that will be of value to people after all. Andrea Coffey and Graham Bashford each volunteered to examine the demo CDs and report back to the group on their findings. Thanks guys!
Graham also said that he has also collected a number of reference resources that he would be willing to put together into a CD for people if there is enough interest. Thanks Graham!.
My article in print:
Peter Evans kindly announced and congratulated me on my article entitled
"Controls Demystified" which was printed in this month's Delphi Magazine. Thanks Peter! I took the
opportunity to explain the error in my bio that said I was involved in the Australian Borland
User Group. This was due to DM unexpectedly having to rush my article into print a month
earlier than expected due to problems they had with another article. Thanks again to those
Aduggers who contributed by critiquing the article before I submitted it.
Complaint to Borland:
A number of ADUG members have expressed dissatisfaction with having to pay money for
upgrading version 3.00 of D3 to version 3.01 . I took these complaints back to Grahame
Porter, Borland's marketing manager and he explained that Borland felt the small
additional charge was justified because of the extra features that were added. Here is a
quote from his recent e-mail:
>>>
I have posted up the Delphi upgrade contents to our
Australian Web pages here.
http://www.borland.com.au/products/Delphi/d3update.html
There are three additions to Delphi that we believe are worth
paying an extra few dollars for. I personally would have
preferred a downloadable patch but due to the significance of
the changes (such as the CAB deployable BDE for example)
this was not possible and an entire new product needed to be
shipped. Therefore a small charge was made to cover costs
of cutting, shipping, handling, freight and admin. If any of
your members feel strongly enough, get them to email me and
I will put forward their case for next time. It is unlikely that
we will reverse the decision on this occasion, but I do have
quite some sway with the folks in the US.
<<<
Grahame is a very reasonable fellow so don't be afraid to take him up on his offer to provide feedback on this issue. If you prefer you could simply e-mail me (AIMTEC1@Compuserve.com) and I'll pass on the petition!
The ADUG treasurer Andrea Coffey reminded us that a number of membership renewals are still outstanding. Some concern was expressed by members that they needed more reminding. Apparently one e-mail wasn't enough so we should maybe get a robot to send out regular reminders when you are overdue! J I asked how many people knew that they were un-financial and a couple of guys bravely owned up. I won't embarass them by publishing their names here ..... yet J
As usual there was a lot of variety and here are just some of the points that I managed to jot down.
Steve Moller advised Mick Bowden that he had found a solution to his expression parsing problem in issue 23 of the Delphi Magazine.
Jason King asked how to copy controls at design time and Keith Latham explained how to do this via the clipboard using copy and paste. It was also noted that control captions may be changed by this process, especially when the caption was either empty, or the same as the name of the control. I also noted that you should make sure you select the target container control (eg. panel or notebook page) before pasting or the controls may actually end up on the background control.
I'm not quite sure how, but this also led into a discussion of the use of the Escape key to find out what is actually the parent control. This is also very useful when you are trying to get to the parent control when it is completely occluded by a child with Align set to alClient.
Don Macrae asked Graham Bashford about why he was interested in reading the HD serial number and Graham explained that it was part of a scheme to prevent software piracy and that he had been using this technique for some time in D1. Graham explained his technique at length, but I must admit that I didn't follow all the details.
Keith Latham lightheartedly remarked that you can also use disk serial numbers when creating a catalogue of music CDs!
Somebody asked how to provide a graphic background for MDI child windows in Delphi 1. Steve Moller said he had some code to do it and would post it on the ADUG mailing list.
Graham Bashford explained a problem he was having getting a DBNavigator to work properly after reassigning its DataSource property. Apparently the problem wasn't so easy to reproduce bacause it seemed work ok on one form, but not another. Don Macrae suggested having two DBNavigators and just make the appropriate one visible. Keith Latham suggested various things like opening and closing datasets but Graham said he had tried that. It looked to me like the only way to figure out what's happening is to try to reproduce the problem in a minimal application.
Instead of a formal presentation Don Macrae showed us a recent Delphi 1 application he had developed and invited comments and constructive criticism.
The idea worked very well and there was a strong flow of suggestions and a great deal of interest in the issues raised. Here are some of them:
Keith Latham suggested that the introductory panel had too much information and it would be better if the user signed on first.
Steve Moller suggested that a lot of information could be shown in a status bar.
Andrea Coffey suggested that for read only values you should use a label instead of an edit field. As an alternative I suggested a read only edit field with the background set to clButtonFace as this would still allow the user to copy and paste the data if they so wished.
A section of the program involved selection of items from a list with a subsequent "choose this one" button. Many people felt that it would be better to simply choose the item from a combo box, with the issue of creating "new" items being handled by a special "new" item in the list, or a separate "new" button.
Don explained that his use of a calendar for date selection was very cumbersome and indicated that it would probably have been better for the user to simply type in the date. Most people agreed, although Keith came in from far left field with a suggestion about using a slider. Sorry Keith! <g>
There were several minor cosmetic problems noted such as slight misalignment of some controls and some inconsistency in placement and naming of next/previous buttons.
Steve Moller suggested that there should be better indication of missing inputs at the end of the input process, perhaps even changing the active control to indicate values that were still required.
Keith suggested that you could take this even further by providing the user at any time with an indication of items that still needed doing.
Peter Evans drew attention to the fact that one of the more important output results wasn't highlighted very well in the final page.
Mick Bowden suggested that this result should actually be visible at all time so that the user could see straight away the effects of his/her changes.
Steve Moller took this idea even further by suggesting that you could even show how much the result had changed.
Peter Viola and Peter Evans both highlighted the problem of using the colour red in an application as apparently a high proportion (around 10%) of the male population is blind to this colour.
Don asked for suggestions of a graphing component with which the user could also interact by dragging points on the graph. Graham Bashford recommended TeeChart for this.
Peter Viola asked about the analysis process and Don explained how he went about this.
Steve Moller asked about the underlying database and Don explained that he was using Topaz since it didn't need the BDE. He also mentioned that in future he might change this to use an in-memory object model, in a similar way to that used by Steve in one of his projects.
Paul Francis asked about how flexible the application was in the face of changes in business rules, in this case mainly taxation rules. This prompted a brief discussion about the pros and cons of using object models to express business rules.
Many more issues were raised and I believe almost everyone got something out of the exercise. Many thanks Don for putting your work up for such close scrutiny!
The formal part of the meeting closed around 8:15pm but many people stayed around and chatted and the meeting was finally ajourned to "Cafe on Bourke" at 8:45pm.