Irie Tools (Business & Technology)

Quick update: Irie Pascal 3.0 will support Unicode!

So what is Unicode anyway? Well, here is a paragraph from the Unicode home page that can serve as a short definition.

The Unicode Standard is a character coding system designed to support the worldwide interchange, processing, and display of the written texts of the diverse languages and technical disciplines of the modern world. In addition, it supports classical and historical texts of many written languages.

You will probably agree that being able to “interchange, process, and display written text from diverse languages”, sounds like a good thing, but you probably don’t want to have to worry to much about the details. So the plan is for Irie Pascal 3.0 to follow the example of other programming languages like Java and C#, and use Unicode internally for all strings and convert as necessary when reading strings in or writing strings out.

The Benefits

The benefits of supporting Unicode are:

• Easy processing of XML and other text on the web.
• Programs can be written in any language (you will be able to use any language for variable names, comments, etc).

Learning about Unicode

I spent the last few days at the Unicode home page (the official source of information about the Unicode standard) learning about Unicode. What did I learn? Well, Unicode is complex, and the Unicode standard was not written to be easy to read or understand. I did learn enough to know that supporting Unicode is going to be both interesting and challenging.

I Ordered a book (about Unicode) from Amazon

I ordered this book, Unicode Demystified: A Practical Programmer’s Guide to the Encoding Standard, from Amazon. It looks good, hopefully it will be helpful.

The recent takeover attempt by Microsoft seems to have really scared the living daylights out of Yahoo, they are introducing new products as fast as they can.

Yahoo just introduced BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) which, as the name suggests, allows you to build a customized search product on top of the Yahoo search platform. Check out this TechCrunch article, Yahoo Radically Opens Web Search With BOSS, for more information.

Well, I finally got around to testing Irie Pascal on Windows Vista and in general I was pleasantly surprised. Not only does Vista look great (by the way, be sure to check out the stunning screen backgrounds if you have not done so already), but Irie Pascal looks great on Vista as well.

As far as functionality goes, Irie Pascal ran almost perfectly on Vista, the only issue was the one I was expecting, Irie Pascal uses WinHelp for it’s online help but Vista does not include the WinHelp engine. As an experiment I downloaded the WinHelp engine from the Microsoft web site and installed it, but I ran into some weird problems. I can probably fix these problems but I think I am going to switch to the newer (and better) HTML Help engine instead. Actually, I am planning to update Irie Pascal so that it will support both WinHelp and HTML Help. Irie Pascal will use WinHelp on Windows 95 and Windows NT, and use HTML Help on the later versions of Windows.

I have spent the last couple of days experimenting with the Microsoft HTML Help Workshop, which I found to be (hmm what’s a nice way to put this) unsophisticated. Anyway, after some trial and error, I have learned enough to add support for HTML help to Irie Pascal.

After Irie Pascal is updated to support Windows Vista, I am planning to make some other changes before releasing the update (these other changes will mostly be about making it easier to write web applications).

Now that the first service pack for Windows Vista seems to be just around the corner (first quarter in 2008), I am really feeling the pressure to at least test Irie Pascal on Windows Vista. I believe the only issue with supporting Irie Pascal on Windows Vista is that Irie Pascal uses WinHelp for online help but WinHelp has been depreciated and is no longer included with Windows Vista. Of course, there may be other issues, so I will just have to install Windows Vista and see what happens.

The annoying thing is that the reason I used WinHelp for Irie Pascal is that, at the time, it was the only help engine that was included in all versions of Windows. Well, I had a good run with WinHelp, now maybe it’s time for an update.

Once upon a time, in the kingdom of Jamaica, there lived a man with a lot of books (fiction & non-fiction). He bought almost all of his books from a magic store, called Amazon. Amazon was in in a far away kingdom but the man had a computer (I mean magic transportation device) that he used to instantly travel to Amazon. At Amazon he would find thousands of books of every description, the magic store would even talk to him and suggest books that he could buy.

For years the man from Jamaica was happy, he loved his books and he loved Amazon. He loved Amazon because unlike other magic stores Amazon did not care that he lived in Jamaica, if he had the money pay for books the magic Amazon store would gladly sell them to him.

One day, the man from Jamaica heard that on the following day, Amazon would start selling a magic book reader that could store hundred of books. The man got so excited he could hardly go to sleep that night. As soon as he woke up, the next morning, the man rushed to his magic transportation device and poof he was at Amazon.

There waiting by the door was the magic book reader, called the Kindle. The Amazon store told him many things about the Kindle, but the most important thing Amazon told the man was “Wireless connectivity enables you to shop the Kindle Store directly from your Kindle—whether you’re in the back of a taxi, at the airport, or in bed”. The store seemed quite excited about this “wireless connectivity” and how the Kindle did not need a magic transportation device. The man did not understand why the store was so excited about “wireless connectivity”, because with his magic transportation device he could buy books faster than he could read them (especially since he had other things to do during the day, besides reading books), so he did not care that he could buy books from the back of a taxi.

Eventually as the magic Amazon store continued to drone on about the Kindle, the man realized that he could not buy books for the Kindle in Jamaica. The man could only buy books for the Kindle if he travelled to the far away Kingdom where the Amazon store was located. So feeling very disappointed the man used his magic transportation device and returned home.

THE END

I just finished reading “CSS The Definitive Guide” by Eric A.. Moyer, published by O’REILLY. I rate this book 4 out of 5 stars. It was very good but the reason I didn’t give it 5 stars was because I wanted a precise specification of CSS 2.1 to guide me in implementing software for authoring web pages, however I found that, not surprisingly, the official CSS 2.1 specification is better for that purpose.

The first few chapters of this book cover the basics of Cascading Style Sheets in a very clear and comprehensive manner. Later chapters, covering more advanced topics, and were very good also, but I found that their description of what goes on “under the hood” was not as good as in the official specification.

If I had to pick only one CSS book then I would prefer the  “CSS The Missing Manual” by David Sawyer McFarland, published by O’REILLY, but you probably would not be wasting your money if you decided to buy both books.

Below are links to the product pages on Amazon of the two books mentioned in this review:

CSS: The Definitive Guide

CSS: The Missing Manual

Please note that I am a member of the Amazon Associates program and I receive a percentage of the sales made through these links.

Hello again. I am back to share with you some of my plans for the future of Irie Tools.

The future of Irie Tools is all about focus, focus, and focus. Instead of producing a general purpose Pascal programming environment (i.e. Irie Pascal), Irie Tools will focus on web development (both web sites and web development tools). The web development tools are expected to include:

• An open source XHTML engine that will make it easy to generate XHTML pages using any programming language (I think there are ‘better’ ways to do this than ASP.NET and JSP).
• The next major release of Irie Pascal (i.e. version 3.0) which will be enhanced and integrated with the XHTML engine to make it easy to create web sites.

The plan is that the web development tools will support web development on Windows only (at least initially). However the hosting platform (i.e. the platform you would use to host the web sites) will be the Apache web server, running on Windows, FreeBSD, and Linux (Red Hat, other distributions will be added later).

Why did I make the decision to focus? Well, I have been reading alot of business books recently (about product strategy and branding), and they all seem to agree that it is a good thing for a business (especially a small business) to find an area of specialization and focus there.

Why focus on web development? Web development has the advantages of being an important (and growing more important every day) area of software development, but still relatively new (with room for new players and new ways of doing things).

P.S. Of course when the next major release of Irie Pascal becomes available special upgrade prices will be offered to existing customers.