Today was a milestone. We demonstrated the Linux version of FieldWorks TE to a group of people at the office chapel time. It worked well enough for the demo, in that it wasn’t slow and didn’t crash, and the people were impressed 
Progress has been very rapid in the past month or two, for several reasons, but today was the first time that we felt TE was ready to show to others. It was helpful to have the extra incentive of a scheduled demo for the final push to get things working on a non-developer machine.
We plan to make a binary version available for the Windows TE developers at Jaars to look at, and the work we did for the demo will help with this. Soon, they’ll also be able to build copies from source for themselves.
Some of the reasons for the rapid progress are:
1. All the hard work that went into porting the infrastructure over the past two years.
2. A decision to work with SWF for the UI for the time being, even though it has some shortcomings.
3. The use of a Windows-hosted database across a network connection.
Some of the big things that are still missing are:
1. A local database.
2. Proper text rendering using Graphite and Pango.
3. A real side-bar implementation (awaiting development of a DotNetBar replacement).
This is still pre-alpha software, and depends on a pre-release version of Mono built from source, but we feel we have come a long way and that it’s time to begin reviewing our progress with other FieldWorks developers.
Links to screen shots:
April 30th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Congrats. Very interesting that you’re using Flash/Flex for the UI?
April 30th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
No, actually. It uses .Net’s System.Windows.Forms UI framework which I (unwisely) abbreviated as “SWF”. Sorry for the confusion. Mono’s implementation of System.Windows.Forms continues to improve, and after Tom and the guys at Palaso fixed a number of bugs it was able to run TE sufficiently. Tom has also fixed a good number of bugs in Mono’s COM implementation. (COM is used for interfacing to unmanaged, typically C++, code modules.)
May 1st, 2009 at 8:40 am
Well done. It must be gratifying to get that out in time for our meetings next week.
May 4th, 2009 at 7:42 pm
Wow! Fantastic news!
Well done guys, I’m really glad to hear that you’ve made it all the way to a (nearly) fully fledged TE. It must have been quite a journey.
May 6th, 2009 at 2:41 am
Great work!
May 11th, 2009 at 9:39 am
Thanks, Andy and Steve. It was an interesting journey, and one that took a great deal of perseverance and determination. So it was great to see the interest and encouragement shown in the ported TE when I showed it at the Dallas meetings last week.
May 12th, 2009 at 10:39 am
Indeed, need to see progress to keep the morale.
June 12th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
Congratulations, Neil! All the best for the rest of the TE journey.