The LA Fox Develo per

A Newsletter for FoxPro Application Developers in Southern California

March 1995

LA Fox President’s Column

by Chuck Williams

Last Meeting

With Jeff Knight as the speaker, our January

meeting contained a higher than usual level of

entertainment to go along with the technical infor-

mation. Jeff showed an updated version of his

uniquely designed application that serves the

needs of doctors and administrators in hospital

emergency rooms. It tracks everything about

patients, from administrative and insurance details

to symptoms, treatments, and drugs administered.

In the emergency room, users must be able to

access and enter information very quickly, and

must be able to understand and operate the app

with essentially no training.

To meet those requirements, Jeff designed a very

effective user interface operated by a light pen. He

does not use standard FoxPro Reads or Browses

because they are too slow, but instead relies on

Inkey and mouse down functions. The displays are

very dense with information, and look crowded to

the uninitiated, but the medical folks prefer this

approach because they can grasp a large amount

of data in one quick view without flipping between

screens. Working on DOS platform, Jeff built his

own tab style interface, before it became vogue to

do so, and modified the character sets to create

raised buttons and other graphical effects that rival

Windows. The result is easily understandable

displays, very rapid data entry, very intuitive navi-

gation, and instant screen refresh. (Note that in

this case data access speed is less important than

screen refresh speed, so the thing that FoxPro

brings to the party is not Rushmore but flexibility in

designing the interface.) The app currently runs on

a DOS platform, for reasons of screen speed and

(Con't, page 2)

In this issue

dBase for Windows

Software Metrics

Hot Tip

Out and About

by Barry R. Lee

LA Fox Becomes a Mini-Devcon

The next three months will be like a mini-DevCon at

LA Fox. So get your pencils out and write down these

dates and times:

March 15, 1995, 7:30 PM - Ken Levy. Ken Levy is a

Software Engineer in the Product Development Group

at Flash Creative Management, Inc. Before joining

Flash, Ken specialized in Rapid Application Develop-

ment (RAD) tools at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

in Pasadena, CA. His GENSCRNX program revolu-

tionized development in the FoxPro community. Ken

was also a major presenter at this years DevCon,

speaking on Visual FoxPro’s “Visual Class Designer’,

as well as filling in for Rob Copeland in “Managing

Class Libraries”.

April 19, 1995, 7:30 PM - Tom Rettig. An Xbase

evangelist since 1981, Tom is internationally recog-

nized as an authority on the language and its various

dialects and implementations. He worked on the

design and implementation of dBASE Ill as member of

Ashton-Tate’s development team, independently wrote

the original Clipper Extend Libraiy, and released two

award-winning products, Tom Rettig’s Libraiy and Tom

Rettig’s Help. He is currently upgrading his rapid

(Con't, page 3)

P.3

P.5

P.6

The March meeting of LA Fox will be held on Marct

15, 1995, at 7:30 PM at our regular meeting place

the Torrance Airport, 3301 Airport Drive, in Tor-

rance). For details on how to get there, see the

map on the back page.