Well, what has changed is that Windows 7 is fully supported - v.3 would not save my databases from one system start to the next. This was a documented problem for many users. The underlying sourcecode has also been extensively re-written and the groundwork laid to add a bunch of features.
Here's the
changelog for v.4:
17 October 2010 - do-Organizer version 4.0.6 released (major version)
Changes
•To the user, there doesn't "appear" to be many changes as all the major work has been "under the hood". But as you may appreciate, getting solid foundations laid is very important.
•A great deal of the database engine has changed in version 4. Taking over a year of development and testing , the engine is now faster than ever whilst providing a solid data storage platform. If sure you will notice the difference in speed.
•Improved Unicode recognition, especially where there are rich formatted notes. You will notice you can paste Arabic and a lot of other language text directly into do-Organizer 4 now.
•New SQL functions have been added to allow the advanced data query operators. Almost anything can be extraced and manipulated using the new functions. This gives great flexibility when the built-in Reports or List Grids fail to deliver exactly what you need.
•UI (User Interface) has been tweaked and corrected in a lot of places. There's quite a lot of hidden windows and forms so this is an ongoing development. However, our goal is not to change the UI too much so the learning curve remains steady and easy.
•Future protocols. Work has been done to enable the mailer, browser and other data streams to recognise some of the newer Internet protocols. This will diversify towards HTML5 and Android.
and what's coming up:
•Social and Virtual World connectivity, in particular, Second Life, OpenSim grids, FaceBook, Twitter and there will be a direct dedicated connection to our own 3d virtual world. More details on this is expected in the coming month or so.
•Scheduling integration of Calendar/Tasks/Resource. Improved relationships with contacts for easier and better scheduling based on frequency and some automatic virtual linking mechanisms.
•Finance and transactions will be enhanced for those businesses running virtual and website business. Improved import and customer tracking for purchases of virtual world goods. This will also work the other way around for customers who wish to track expenses throughout their social communications and virtual purchases to websites and other membership areas.
•Photo Gallery organization. This will be a unique ability to manage multiple images easier especially for photographs and easier faster ways to upload to places like Flickr.
•Journals Blogging will be enhanced to better integrate and manage blog articles with links to blog distribution.
•Scribe will be enhanced to provide better Unicode support and also for authors of book publications to store complete chapters with ease. The main concentration with be towards writers of novels.
•Linx will be upgraded to use HTML5 and latest CSS. This means more accurate web pages rendered in the doBrowser as well as in the Mailer section and Javascript will be a whole lot faster. The proposed engine for use will be the same one used in the Google Chrome browser.
•do-Organizer 4 Enterprise will be a spin-off for those who wish to setup a large scale database. The database engine in use wil be MySQL, thereby allowing a userbase of literally thousands of connections. As this MySQL database can be hosted on your Linux servers, the link between web page business directly to the do4 database would be a lot easier, especially for managing customers and products.
Overall, I *hope* this signals good things for the future from gemX. It's been, what, three years since I started this thread? I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and watch development. I'm not really interested in the software anymore- for the reasons noted above - but am watching development with interest.
Ah... Dormouse beat me to posting! As always, more eloquent (and economical with his words) than I!
Recent Posts
(and I missed the thread mouser pointed to....)
Thanks for posting in this thread, Don. I'm a bit of a "we fear change" type when it comes to software name changes. I was also unimpressed when another DC regular who is also a software developer (Pierre Landry) changed the name of his product from SQLNotes to InfoQube... my objections seem rather silly a year on!
