Rich: Thanks for this note. This gives me an opportunity to tell you where Dartware is heading with its cross-platform development.
> --- "Rich Battin" wrote: > Are there other feature or performance differences between Console and > Traditional? I have been using Traditional for many years and would like to > see a comparison chart or reasons (pros and cons) to switch. Is Traditional > development dead or dying? The following Graphical User Interface (GUI) features are present in InterMapper Traditional on OSX, but not in the Java client: - Device List - Info Window - Responsibility list for notifications At the same time, we've been enhancing the Java client with a lot of features that we hope you will find valuable. The following items are in the Java client, and not in Traditional: - Interfaces window - User-settable helper applications - Easy import of icons and sounds - Dramatically improved icon picker - NT Services probe - Map export and import - Geographic importing - Deleting old strip chart data As you can probably guess, it's expensive (time consuming) to incorporate and test the GUI changes into both the Traditional and Java client user interfaces. We cannot attain the rate of enhancements that we all desire if we continue to develop both. (For similar reasons, we have dropped the MacOS 9 build from the InterMapper 4.3 release.) Consequently, we have made the decision to focus virtually all GUI development on the Remote/Console program. While it may be true that the Java client isn't quite as snappy as the Traditional, I've been using it almost exclusively for the last six months on a modest machine, and I believe it's quite good, and will continue to improve, especially as Apple enhances the JVM. (As an aside, some of the delays are network imposed... Status Windows and other interactive stuff require the client to retrieve information from the server process over a network connection. The good news is that it's possible to use InterMapper Remote to do this across the continent; the downside is that this will never be as fast as as C++ function call.) So, the answer to your question is, Yes, you'll need to use InterMapper Console (or Remote) to get these new goodies. Let me run down the ramifications here: - Every InterMapper distribution on MacOS X comes with a fully-licensed copy of InterMapper Console at no cost. (It's the default installation now.) Even if you continue to use Traditional, you can use this version of Console to get the new GUI features. - We plan to maintain feature parity with the "server" portion of InterMapper Traditional for the forseeable future. That is, you can use InterMapper Console/Remote to get all the features of the InterMapper product. - There are a few notable features that are available in Traditional (listed above) that we have not ported to the Remote/Console. We plan to do the most important of these relatively soon. We'd love feedback about the relative importance to you. - Longer term, Dartware remains committed to our cross-platform products. We have significant sales on all platforms - MacOS X, Windows, Unix, and Linux. We did the heavy lifting to isolate the platform-specific code two years ago, so it doesn't cost much for us to build for these OS's. We have no plans to drop any of the current distributions. So that's where Dartware is heading. In parallel with this cross-platform strategy, we have a long list of enhancements that we might work on. I'll send a separate note (Subject: Wish List) in which I'll solicit your thoughts for new capabilities. Please get back to me if you have further thoughts or questions. Thanks! Rich Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dartware, LLC http://www.dartware.com 10 Buck Road, PO Box 130 Telephone: 603-643-2268 Hanover, NH 03755-0130 USA Fax: 603-643-2289 ____________________________________________________________________ List archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/intermapper-talk%40list.dartware.com/ To unsubscribe: send email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
