August 12th, 2008 Pete Brower
Well, it’s been a little while since I’ve posted anything about the new release. We have been in a limited beta the past two weeks. We’ve found a few issues so far that we’ve fixed. We should be expanding the limited beta to some new sites in the next week or two. Things are looking good so far. One thing that happened is that the release has been renumbered. Instead of 4.3 it will be 5.0. The changes in this release are so significant that it seemed to warrant a major release number update. That’s about all I can tell you about it for now. I’ll post again as things progress.
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June 30th, 2008 Pete Brower
I found a few items last week in the new file encryption feature I was testing that concerned me. I was able to corrupt my data files in a certain way. So, we are going to delay the limited beta release for a few days so that I can make sure my fixes are solid. I don’t think anyone wants to load a beta that has the potential to corrupt data. The problems I found were fairly straight forward as were the fixes. I just really like to error on the side of safety. Being a short week I would expect our new date to be a week from today. Monday July 7th.
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June 25th, 2008 Pete Brower
The 4.3 beta release is still moving forward and I think we will have a Linux limited beta ready by the 30th. We will follow that with other platforms as we port the code and compile. That may take several weeks before we have all the platforms available for beta testing. We also need to complete an upgrade conversion utility. A lot of the file structures in System Admin have changed and we must write the conversion tool to get those files restructured.
Limited Beta? I’ve had some questions about what that means. Well, that means you need to contact us about your interest in testing and we will work out what you are willing to test and get you a copy of the software when it is available. It will not be available for general download at this point. With the System Admin file changes we don’t think it’s a good idea to have everyone downloading it and creating problems with their current production installs. Obviously you DO NOT want to run this beta (or any beta) in production. That being said, if you are willing and have time to run this beta isolated from your production environment please contact us.
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June 3rd, 2008 Pete Brower
Well, we’ve been very busy testing and are getting close to going into a limited beta. We have set a deadline of June 23rd as the cutoff date for fixing and testing. That will give us a week to clean up the documentation, build the release, do test installs, and fix anything we find in that process. Then we will have the beta available on June 30th for download and beta testing. This will be a limited beta. If you would like to be involved please let us know. If you participate there will likely be areas of the release that we ask you to test specifically. So if you volunteer to help please make sure you have the time needed to test and the willingness to test some areas we specifically ask you to test. Thank you for your patience and support as we’ve worked through this release.
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April 28th, 2008 Pete Brower
Well, just a small update on how testing is progressing. Looks like we are about done with testing PDF Output, the new Appx Connection manager (on unix), Client/Server SSL encryption, and the new Appx session monitor. No big surprises here. A few small cleanup items that are mostly done. We seem to now be in the middle of testing the new source code control features, upgraded database interfaces, audit logging of file changes, and new ILF statements.
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April 14th, 2008 Pete Brower
Well, in the process doing extensive testing of PDF output in 4.3 we came upon an issue that we think we need to deal with. It’s not a new issue but does cause some problems. The problem is that the LABEL and RAWTEXT widget types are being treated the same. If you have an alpha or text field defined as a RAWTEXT widget it will act as a LABEL. Vertically centering, doing html formatting, etc. Actually even if you have no widget defined you still get the html formatted instead of raw. Read the rest of this entry »
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April 10th, 2008 Pete Brower
Testing continues on the release. We have spread out into other areas. In addition to testing PDF output we have divided up the rest of the feature and enhancement list among our staff. Jeff is testing file encryption, application design enhancements, user related enhancements, and new ILF statements. Yana is testing the Appx session monitor, upgraded database interfaces, and data change logging. Joe is testing client/server encryption and the new connection managers. Pete is testing library updates to our ODBC interface, the newer PDFlib utilities we use for PDF output, and our source code control system. Steve is testing PDF output and our source code control system. Not much else to report right now. No significant surprises or test failures have surfaced so far.
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April 3rd, 2008 Pete Brower
This is my first blog posting to this category so this may be a little longer than my future postings. I picked APPX 4.3.0 as my topic since that’s where R&D is spending all it’s efforts and there have been a number of questions concerning the status. Enough of that, let’s get on with it!
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April 3rd, 2008 Steve Frizzell
I am sure that many of you have been wondering what happened to APPX release 4.3. APPX 4.3 has taken us way longer to complete than we ever imagined that it would. Read the rest of this entry »
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