The LA Fox Develo per

A Newsletter for FoxPro Application Developers in Southern California

April 1994

LA Fox President’s Column

by Chuck Williams

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 signa-

tures from forgeries.

This was a whole new world for most of us - 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 pros-

pects 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 demon-

strated 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

XPro User Group News

by Randy Unruh

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 gen-

eral consensus of the group was Gladiator was inter-

esting 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 pro-

moting 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 Rich-

ard 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 distinc-

tion 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.”)

(Con’t, page 8)

Inside this issue

FoxPro 3.0 Preview - Page 4

Hot Off the Wire - Page 5

Books and Toys - Page 6

From the Pen of Ken - Page 9