Christof,
> Would you mind talking a bit about your Guineu project? > > How it is going? Are you committed to it? Any links to information > on the project? > A difficult topic... How is it going? Slowly. Am I committed? Yes, but regular business has priority. When I started the project 2006 my world looked different. On the technical side Nokia was dominating the cell phone market and Windows CE/PocketPC/Windows Mobile a viable alternative. I was an independent freelancer with half a dozen FoxPro clients working on a dozen projects at the same time. Most of my work was revolving around solving technical VFP problems. Guineu was a nice project to relax in the evening. These days I have employees and a new born to take care of. My daily work alternates between managing a company, working with non-developer customers and maintaining a FoxPro DOS app. My evenings are filled with changing diapers. On the technical side Microsoft and I are going separate ways mostly. On the mobile market neither they, nor Nokia are relevant anymore, except on niche markets such as scanner solutions. What does that mean for Guineu... Well, just right now I'm creating a scanner solution for a client using Guineu on a Skorpio X3 scanner (the latest ones from Datalogic). In the course I've added a few small features that have not been published. So, I am using Guineu in production and I still think that scanners and similar devices are a great niche for Guineu. The past few months (actually since around mid 2012) I've been preparing the Guineu source code to release it to open source, as frankly, I can't maintain it on a commercial level. That's mostly a resource issue, not necessarily a money issue. That too is going slower than expected, as right now the source code is a mess with comments in two languages, half-finished refactorings, code snippets where I need to complete credits and some parts where I need to clarify license and copyrights of code snippets I was using. Implementing Guineu has also become more challenging... My initial release only had two major platforms to support: The compact framework and the full-blown desktop framework. I added special cases like SQL server integration, ASP.NET web forms and ActiveX controls, which never were much in demand. Nowadays, though, you would need to support an integrated WPF and Silverlight solution for the desktop that combines Visual Studio and the Guineu runtime, maybe marrying this with the VFP Studio project that also kind of came to a halt. You would need a Windows RT and Windows Phone integration. Both of these platforms are hard to translate from a traditional VFP form, which also means integration into Visual Studio. Many requests have been for iOS and Android integration. Technically, both would be possible with MonoTouch and MonoDroid/Xamarin. But that's even more platforms to support that don't translate well from the classical VFP app. Not to mention Azure which would also support Guineu. That said, I'm definitely open for suggestions. -------------------- Thanks for the detailed reply. Quoting from your reply to Malcolm back in 2007: "Guineu targets the VFP developer who basically wants to remain a VFP developer, but needs new platforms (especially the PDA) and the confidence that their application will continue to work on new versions of Windows (beyond Vista) after 2015." That hit some high notes for me. I'd hope to see you keep the big picture project going for the longer term, and in the shorter term, as you're doing, focus on smaller, niche apps that can do well in a global market while still advancing the technology. Scanner apps sound like a great example. Best wishes for your new baby! Bill _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://mail.leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://mail.leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[email protected] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
