WorkXpress goes in for some pastic surgery

Today the Engineering Team at WorkXpress took the bandages off of the Engine after a few rounds of plastic surgery; and it looks goood.

Below are some screen shots of before and after the changes :

Production Mode : No Tools, 'old and busted':

Production Mode : No Tools, 'new hotness':

Development Mode : With Tools, 'old and busted':

Development Mode : With Tools, 'new hotness':

Never, ever... touch.. the red button!

The Branding Spot : Week 3

The Week 3 review of how things are going with "The Branding Spot" has been posted. Please take a minute to check it out : http://tiny.cc/JTcoM

The Scoop on PaaS

Ever wonder how a PaaS might help a mid to large sized business like the one you work for? Give this post a quick read, and if it strikes a nerve "Oh yeah.. we deal with that.. and MAN is it a drag!", get in touch with Jake, or Anna, or the Sales Team so we can have a deeper discussion about how we might help you out!

Believe it or not.. we truely want to help!

http://www.workxpress.com/blog/2009/06/5gl-paas-will-change-it-landscape

WorkXpress working with The Branding Spot

Recently Jake Burns wrote : http://www.workxpress.com/blog/2009/06/week-2-week-week-introspective-how-branding-spot-will-use-workxpress-transform-clients-

It's exciting to me, having worked on the platform since the beginning, to hear customers say things like

"As far as we know, and we’ve done the research, our company will be far ahead of the curve in ability to provide companies exactly the staffing they need to pull off successful sampling and other promotional events. "

It's just very rewarding. I get a similar thrill out of walking down the hall and seeing TexVisions Users screens with WorkXpress up on them. It's one thing to build a product, and make it the best you can, but its another to have a business owner choose it to help run their business. Despite all the customers using WorkXpress, it still excites me to see it :-)

Last, I'll just say that I really enjoy working with Noah. He's a sharp guy, communicates well with his customers, and communicates well with the Dev team on the occasion that ne needs to. For the most part, tho, he doesn't need to.. and that brings a satisfaction all it's own.

Q2 (early Q3) 2009 Upcoming Engine Features

The WorkXpress Engine Development team's schedule is booked, and the requests keep coming. More work the better, I say :-) I have posted the items we'll be working on for the next 4-6 weeks on the WorkXpress Blog, so if you're interested check it out :

http://www.workxpress.com/forums/upcoming-features/714

The Videos are up!

Today is a capstone day, marking the completion of a recent video production project that we embarked on.  A few weeks back we had my brother, Tim McLain, up for a 1 day "shooting spree", shooting the raw video for our training videos, introduction and our "Build an app in 10 minutes" video.

He turned them around quite fast, and after wrestling with the bandwidth costs of hosting the videos ourselves, we decided to post them on Google's Video service.  That went quite smoothly, and we got the videos posted to our live website around 1:00PM today.

My favorite video is the "Build an Application in 10 minutes" video and it's one that really captures the basics of what WorkXpress IS, and what it's used for.  I urge any of you who still don't understand "What does WorkXpress do/What is it?"  Please, enjoy this video!

How WorkXpress cut my project timeline by 70%

Recently I wrote a Blog post for WorkXpress about how I was able to produce a fully featured Systems and Network Monitoring tool in record time, and with 100% user satisfaction.

Check it out here!

Does a Fox go on Safari, or to the Opera?

Browsers, the bane of all web developers. Anyone who's ever tried to write their own web code (not talking about DWeaver, Blogger, Google Pages, or even AngelFire) has gotten this inevitable email.

Dear Webmaster,

I'm using Netscape 3 and your web page doesn't look right!

Sincerely,
0.5% of the Market Share

The existence of more than 1 web browser has lead to a lot of extra work for web developers all over the world. This morning my desktop looks like this :

I have just completed close to a week of cleanup of our WX2 engine fixing small problems that effect one browser or another. Mostly, IE7 is the problem as it treats the box model, float and positioning layers a bit differently than the other browsers do; and... according to a few of the leading browser market-share reporting sites, it still holds a small lead over FireFox.

I'm encouraged tho, the balance of "power" is starting to shift.

I looked at w3schools (IE6+7 43%, FF 45% in Jan), W3Counter (IE6+7 57%, FF 31%), and stats for our own site :

And it's undeniable that FireFox is on the rise.

IE8 : Good News * 2

1: Supposedly, IE8 is aimed at fixing the rampant IE standards compliance issues that have been causing web developers so much headache over the past 10 years. How good is it? Well.. the latest beta finally passes the ACID 2 test, but doesn't do too well on ACID 3 (20/100). No browser of Microsoft's has ever scored well on those tests, at least they seem to be trying.

2: According to reports by people who spend time trying this kind of stuff out you will be able to uninstall IE8! So, I'm *hoping* this means mainstream PC makers, like Dell and HP, will consider taking a few hours to implement a simple interface to let people pick which browser they would like to use when they "setup their computer" the first time it boots.

I see some argument for including IE with Windows, unlike the justice department. If there was *no* web browser, then how would people go download FireFox, Chrome, Opera or Safari? It would be like a network card that doesn't run on Windows XP native drivers (so you have to download the drivers (1.2MB) on another machine, and grab your thumb drive to get them installed.. /sigh).. but I digress.

If you gave someone like my Mom a choice of web browsers, with truthful information about each and let her pick.. would she pick IE? Probably not.

What the WorkXpress Staff really cares about most : Performance

We have spent a lot of energy on trying to make the User Experience for both builders and users of WorkXpress as pleasant as possible. This means neat things like little indicators that AJAX activity is going on inside the Actions interface, on layout load, tab content load, etc. Some of these wait times are caused by the PHP processing on our end, but a healthy % of it is waiting for your browser to process the Javascript (JS) for the page.

So, that means that if your PC is fast, and not doing a whole lot other than WorkXpress, you will have a better experience then if you're also actively running a lot of other apps. If your PC is slow, your WorkXpress experience will be slower; and there's not a lot we can do about it.

What can *you* do about it, besides upgrading your PC? Use a browser with a faster Javascript engine! An independent review of the current, and near-release browsers reveals that FireFox 3.5, Google Chrome. Safari and Opera all have JS engines that are far faster than IE's. Even IE8!

See, while Microsoft has been struggling to catch up with compliance issues (that the other browsers started off handling properly) the other browser companies have been working on making their JS engines lean and mean. We like that; fast JS means fast pages in general, and it means a faster WorkXpress experience.

Get FireFox
Get Chrome
Get Opera
Get Safari (for Windows)

WorkXpress 2 hits the streets!

Ladies and gentlemen, I am VERY proud to announce that WorkXpress 2's public release is officially here!

Check out http://www.workxpress.com; and click on "Sign Up" in the top right corner. This link will take you to a page that lets you get your User/Account setup and ready to roll. Then, after a short call and demo with one of our sales folks (Welcome Steve Treglia!) you'll be ready to rock and roll with WorkXpress.

Over the next few weeks Ill be documenting how to pull a pre-built Application Version off the shelf and use it in an existing, or new Project. I'll show you how to update the Add/Search areas of the header to meld your existing structure in with the newly imported structure, and Ill cover some of the most recent features added to the Engine.

I know it's been over a year since I posted here, but I've been locked in a dark room writing code :-)

Please, check it out and let me know what you think!