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The LA Fox Develo per
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March User Meeting
Sign-On for Fox is a Pen API Interface Library for FoxPro offered by Sign-On Systems of Beverly Hills. The product was presented by Leonard Zerman, a well known local consultant who worked on its development. The idea is to use the strong development environment of FoxPro to create “pen-centric” applications that are designed specifically to work with the Windows for Pen API. Previous pen-based applications have been done with the C language, which entails a formidable learning curve and considerable complexity. With this product, the developer enjoys the power and flexibility of FoxPro development while working at a higher level to create the desired application. Leonard also described another new product called Sign-On Verify, which can be used to authenticate signatures by analyzing not only the character shapes but the velocities and angles during the signing. A live audience demo “proved” the point that it can in fact distinguish real signatures from forgeries.
This was a whole new world for most of us
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with “ink” datatypes and several types of recognizer. In fact handwriting recognition is still in the “1.0 state”, but progress is accelerating, and the prospects are enticing. Some folks like Microsoft and Apple are spending big bucks in anticipation of this growing market.
Leonard was followed by Ken Levy, who demonstrated and described the newly announced FoxPro 2.6 as well as some new tools of his own, which promise to be more exotic than GenScmX. Barry Lee brought copies of the late breaking official word on version 2.6, and there is now a
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XPro User Group News
LAST
MEETING AND NEXT MEETING
We discussed Powerbuilder, a client/server front-end product popular with many well healed corporations. Also Gladiator, a FoxBase (soon to be FoxPro 2.0) to C code library and code converter product. The general consensus of the group was Gladiator was interesting and that we should invite Powersoft to come and show their product and answer questions about their positioning of Powerbuilder to compete with Xbase products. Speaking of Powerbuilder butting in on Xbase turf, there has been some concern in the FoxPro community about Microsoft perceivedly promoting Access at the expense of FoxPro. This seems to be centered around the basic position of the one products (Access) as an end-user tool and the other (FoxPro) as a language based development tool. This is causing some confusion in the market place and among potential customers for FoxPro developers’ services. I thought the following messages I posted on CompuServe would be interesting,
if
not enlightening, on this general subject.
Fm: Randy Unruh To: Lisa Brummel [MSFT] Lisa, I don’t have
it
handy to send, but it is the April 7th
edition of the L.A. Times, Business Section, in a weekly computer column on page 03 written by Richard O’Reilly titled “Sweet Praise for ‘Suite’ Software”. He was reviewing suite software and gave high praise to the MSFT suite (“MSFT Office 4.2 has the distinction of bundling the most state-of-the art software.... Unfortunately the more powerful MSFT FoxPro for Windows database, which grew out of a Microsoft acquisition, is not offered as part of the package.”)
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Inside this issue
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FoxPro 3.0 Preview
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Page 4 Hot Off the Wire
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Page 5 Books and Toys
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Page 6
From the Pen of Ken
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Page 9
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