Status

[Marty Francom]

Paul,
  Just curious about the status of FireFly-3,  Is it close enough to being completed for you to give a targeted release date?
...Marty

[TechSupport]

Hi Marty,

Its been a while since I heard from you. Hope everything is going great with your pharmacy application.

FireFly coding was pretty slow over the last two months. It was only last week that I really got back into the meat of the programming. I am sharing my time between FireFly and another very important application that has been ongoing for a long time as well.

Last week I started working on the code generation modules. Wow! It is amazing now looking back on all that old code just to realize how much better (simple and faster) that my new code is going to be. I have the code generator written for everything except the the generation of the Forms (which is the more complicated code).

The new code editor is progressing nicely. I have implemented the Scintilla editing control so we now have "code folding" which a lot of people like. I have the menu editor done and most of the toolbar editor. I have yet to do anything with the statusbar editor.

Basically, once the conversion of the code is completed so that everything is being written and compiled in FireFly itself, then I will start some early beta testing. Then we need to add the new features like better project management, universal search/replace, code library, etc....

So, overall, a lot has been done but there is still a lot to be done. I can't imagine when it will all be ready but I always hoped that it would be ready by this Fall (just in time for programmers getting back to work after a long summer holiday).

[Roger Garstang]

If you design the MessageBox editor to still generate for the Win API Call, don't forget to add:

CtrlWrd = &B0001001100111111
Asm FLDCW CtrlWrd ; this guarantees extended precision

To Band-Aid the Glitch on some systems...or, you could just use PB's function since lately they support more Flags, etc.  I've been adding the ASM code to just about all my apps that use 64bit numbers too (Apps that use FILETIME, etc), and it doesn't seem to cause any problems, so it could probably be added in the generated code to run at the beginning of all apps too.  That way the precision of the processor is always right if for some reason another app ran and screwed it up that doesn't use the fix.

[Marty Francom]

Paul, The ApotheSoft program has working well now.  The problems that we were having with Cheetah have been resolved.  The major problem that we were having with Cheetah turned out to be a miss-interpetation on our part of how the Single User and Multiuser modes interacted.
.
I am anxiously looking forward to the new version of FireFly....