Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Measuring 'The customer is always right'
Listening to the needs of our customers was always a top priority during the last 17 years at TMS software. The daily communication with our customers has proven to be very fruitful for steering not only what capabilities and features are being added to existing components but also creation of entirely new components and products. As our customer base has grown through the years, the communication has grown too. It is not always easy to determine if some particular feature requests are highly anticipated by a large enough amount of customers or not. In many cases, it is obvious that some feature request makes a lot of sense and will help a lot of customers and then we don't hesitate to add it. In other cases, it's not so clear whether a particular feature would be welcomed by many users. Therefore, we thought it was time add another dimension to the process of deciding what to do.We have released this week an extension to our website, a feature request voting system. On each component/product page the item "Feature requests" was added from where customers can add new feature requests or vote for existing feature requests. These feature requests will then be taken in account with our own internal development planning and roadmap.
We hope this will:
- drive more customers to communicate about their needs
- streamline the process to capture and list these feature requests
- help us to further fine-tune setting the right priorities and doing resource allocation
There is a central point to see the newest votes, top votes or to add a vote. Alternatively, on each component/product page, a link is available from where the features requests relevant to the chosen component are shown or a new feature request can be added.
Page with list of top votes:
At this moment, feature request posting & voting is open to all customers and customers need to login on our website first for identification (you can optionally post a feature request that will be shown as anonymous though). We're eagerly looking forward to hear about your needs and work hard towards addressing what you need the most.
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Bruno Fierens
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Monday, July 16, 2012
It's here: TMS FireMonkey cross-platform grid
After many months of research, developing, testing, polishing and documenting, the team at TMS software is proud to announce the availability of our first TMS FireMonkey cross-platform grid!
Ever since Delphi XE2 was released, we regularly received emails from customers asking when our immensely popular VCL component TAdvStringGrid would be available for FireMonkey. Now, TAdvStringGrid is the result of over 15 years of work. It is built specifically for the Windows platform and many of its features are intricately bound to Windows APIs. The FireMonkey framework is based on a completely different architecture and design, so the only answer we could give to these many questions was to wait till we rebuild a new grid from the ground up. A task that would of course take a significant amount of time.Our team first set out to explore and get acquainted and experienced with the new FireMonkey framework by taking on the development of some smaller lightweight components.Once the team was past the apprentice stage, we started architecting the foundations of the new grid with following requirements in order of priority:
1) fully respect the design principles of the FireMonkey framework: the grid uses FireMonkey objects everywhere and heavily uses styles.
2) cross-platform: like other FireMonkey components, it should be seamless to use the grid on Win32, Win64, Mac OSX and iOS.
3) high performance: grids with 500.000 rows x 10.000 columns should be perfectly usable.
4) LOB feature-rich: focus on offering a wide range of features for typical data presentation & editing in line of business applications.
5) TAdvStringGrid familiarity: focus on a clean intuitively usable & discoverable programmers interface but where possible, make it familiar for VCL grid developers.
Requirement 1 and 2 were given our earlier experience with other FireMonkey component development straightforward. Requirement 3 was by far the hardest. We literally spent weeks on trying to find implementations for achieving an architecture with a high performance that is at the same time as customizable and style-able as a FireMonkey component is supposed to be. Finally, our long experience with TAdvStringGrid also made working on requirements 4 and 5 a bit easier.
So, what feature set made it for v1.0:
- import and export: CSV, TXT, ASC, HTML, XML, RTF (native),XLS (native), streams
- clipboard support
- printing support: print to printer, print to image file, print preview component
- find & replace including find & replace dialogs
- various built-in inplace editors: edit, combobox, datepicker, dial, spin, ... and customizable
- various built-in cell types: text, bitmap, button, checkbox, radiobutton, progressbar, ... and customizable
- cell merging
- fixed header rows, fixed footer rows, fixed left columns, fixed right columns
- column freezing, row freezing
- cell scrolling & pixel scrolling modes
- various selection modes: single cell, range, column, row, disjunct column, row, cell
- sorting: single column & multi column in normal & in grouped mode
- filtering: programmatic row filtering and filter dropdowns in a column header cells
- grouping: built grouping with group headers, group summary rows
- calculations: column calculation results in fixed footer row
- HTML formatted text in cells, URLs in cells
- Fine grained control over keyboard & mouse interaction
- Lots and lots of smaller features
What is planned for upcoming updates:
Work has already started for adding full live bindings support and we have already several things working internally. We'll also be looking at inter component drag & drop. TMS Grid Filters will be updated to support the TMS FireMonkey grid and will offer this way also support for native .XLSX file import/export and of course, we look forward to all your feedback, comments and wishes to steer the development of upcoming versions of our FireMonkey grid. We'll introduce very soon a new platform for you to help us prioritizing on features you need the most.
With all the buzz around the new grid, we'd almost forget that some other new components were added to the TMS Pack for FireMonkey: TTMSFMXEdit, TTMSFMXEditBtn and TTMSFMXNavBar. The TTMSFMXEdit is an advanced edit control with configurable edit types, auto completion and lookup dropdown. TTMSFMXNavBar is an Outlook style navigation control.
Download the trial version of the TMS Pack for FireMonkey v1.5 now at: http://www.tmssoftware.com/site/tmsfmxpack.asp Registered users of TMS Pack for FireMonkey v1.0 or v1.1 receive this update v1.5 free!
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Bruno Fierens
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