NT6 Launch Webinar - Wow!

[Devan]

Well, I attended my first ClarionLive webinar last night to watch the NT6 launch.  I don't normally attend these because they run at 02:30am my time, but decided to stay up to catch this one, and I am glad I did.

First thing I can say is "WOW!".  NT6 looks fantastic.  Congratulations on taking the product to a whole new level Bruce.  The BIG winners in my view are:

1. The Wizards.  I like NetTalk, but coding up a series of basic Browses and Forms is, lets face it, a tedious pain in the butt.  Having the Wizards whip up all of these basic elements and then going through to remove what you don't want will slash my initial ramp up development time significantly.  It's kind of like what scaffolding did for Ruby on Rails.

2. Theme support.  On a recent NT project, the client asked me to make some minor changes to colour and background graphics, and to be honest, it was a lot of effort to dig through CSS files etc. to make changes to the basic look and feel.  With NT6 Themeroller support, AND the ability to change the entire look and feel of your app on the fly - super cool !!

3. Background Process button.  I had no idea how many background processes I would be running in my NT apps.  Because we do a lot of webapps that link to legacy ERP system, there is usually a lot of table refreshing and duplicating that we need to do in the back end to synchronise data.  Previously this was really 'hit or miss' in that we would have to put 'dummy' progress bars and fixed timers on pages to try and achieve this.  To have a button that could maintain a connection to the server AND provide user eedback from a progress bar control is HUGE.

4. Mobile support.  It seems that nearly all NT projects we do now the user is asking us "Oh, can we have that working on iPhones too?".  Granted, what Bruce showed us presently is still very early support that is still in Alpha testing, but at least gives us a glimpse of the future in that we can write just ONE code base to support both Desktop and Mobile devices.

Conclusion - NetTalk 6 is WINNING...  Now, if I could only remember the promotional upgrade code, I would be on the Capesoft store buying the upgrade right now...

[Bruce]

Thanks Devan - it went pretty well, although I missed some stuff that I remembered afterwards. Oh well, that's bound to happen I guess.
I appreciate the effort you made to stay up - I know it happens at a horrible time in Australia. To the other Australian lads I recommend grabbing the recording. John has _already_ made it available so that's super-cool, thanks John.
http://www.clarionlive.com/index.php?option=com_docman&task=cat_view&gid=42&Itemid=57

regarding the progress bars - it doesn't maintain an "open" connection during the process - rather the browser polls from time to time to "see how things are going". However the code does do all the heavy lifting for you, and makes the generated code quite elegant, and therefore hopefully easy to embed into.

Cheers
Bruce

[terryd]

If you want the sincerest form of appreciation I placed my order last night after the Webinar. Now if we could just get those Capies to work over a weekend so we can download it that would be great 

[Bruce]

working on it Terry....

[Skip Williams]

Hi Bruce...

NT6 REALLY looks good.  Watched the webinar late last night. Looking forward to giving it a go.

When its up, should I just install it over 5.xx and just go for it?...or should I be a little more cautious?

Skip

[DonRidley]

Yep.  Bruce put on a great webinar.  I haven't been that excited to see a webinar in a long time.  It was like waiting on the premier of a blockbuster movie or something.

I think NT6 is a game changer on the Clarion playing field.  It will solve many issues.

I am currently converting all of my Win32 projects over to NetTalk.

No new projects will be Win32.

Don

[AZIS350]

Don, I totally agree with you. With NetTalk 5 we already decided our new projects are all going to be web-based instead of Win32, and after watching the webinar yesterday on NetTalk6 I'm more convinced of that then ever. We've already been using NetTalk5 for mobile applications and we've made more money on our web apps recently then our Win32 ones. No more 'but can't we use your app on a Mac'

Bruce, a big thank you to you and your team for your efforts in releasing NetTalk 6.

[terryd]

Bruce
I realise that you had to show a lot in a little time so this may be there but just a query.
Are there individual create browse wizards and create form wizards as well. I am thinking of situations where additional tables are added to the dictionary after the initial website creation.

[Bruce]

Hi Terry,

sort of.
I haven't made separate wizards for browses and forms, however you can re-run the application wizard at any time to "add more". So, for example, if you re-run the wizard when your app is open you'll be able to select some "more files" for browses and forms. Obviously the global stuff is not as relevant at that point (and I need to do some polish in this regard) - but the short answer is yes, you can use it to add browses and forms to your app "after the fact".

cheers
Bruce