ClarionLive show notes for January 17 2014

Owned by David Harms
Jan 17, 2014
2 min read

This week on ClarionLive:

Clarion Getting Real

Mike Hanson's ongoing take on the 37 Signals book goes on: smaller teams are better. Change must be cheap, because the world moves fast. Layers help. Less code. Less features. Pare down the interface. 

An open culture that makes it easy to admit mistakes is good. Be able to change gears and change directions. 

Feature Presentation: Mark Goldberg on Clarion 9.1

Mark did his presentation from Windows 8 which has better support for touch apps than Windows 7. For instance while both have an on-screen keyboard (osk.exe) Windows 8 also has a touch keyboard (tabtip.exe). 

Mark started by compiling a bog standard Clarion app, unmodified, and showed how it responds to touch input. Then he changed the app to use his derived WindowManager class with touch support and rebuilt the app. This time it automatically popped up the touch keyboard where appropriate.

The essence of Mark's code is to run tabtip.exe whenever the user is on an entry, spin, combo, or text control. Tab makes the keyboard go away (standard Windows behavior). 

Mark demonstrated the SoftVelocity touch demo and showed how he enhanced it to show detailed debugging including such information as touch pressure. All of the touch data received by the operating system is available to Clarion 9.1 apps, including gestures. Mark's added code does things like translate names to equates to make debugging easier. 

Mark also mentioned the undocumented Cla$FIELDNAME function which returns the name of a field equate.This function isn't new to 9.1 - it's been in the Clarion runtime for a long time. 

Clarion Live Version Control Convert-A-Thon (CAT)

Rick Martin laid some groundwork for next Thursday's open webinar on why and how to use source control. This was actually a pretty extensive presentation and is illuminating not just for Rick's process but for the benefits of version control in general, especially for team development. 

Rick has an essential add-in for version control, available through ClarionShop.