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Software Profitability to a Micro-ISV

As entrepreneur of software industry I would like to collect some opinions about different questions related with the business of a Micro-ISV. In such sense I've the idea of publish some polls to know the opinion of other people, mainly people related with the IT industry with some experience on these topics.

Let me start with a simple poll to identify what sort of software is worth to develop, selecting only between two options.

Thanks in advance by your participation!

Online Surveys & Market Research

VisualWorks Box!

Some days ago, when I downloaded the NC version of VisualWorks, I found also this page, with the possibility of request a CD of VWNC to Cincom. Then, I completed the form and forgot the question.

Today, very very few days after such request, I received on my home, on Sunchales, Argentina a box containing a software box, coming from Cincinnati!.

And, as in old (good) times, when the software comes from the producers inside nice boxes with manuals. (Even my own modest products of past times (Biochemical Laboratories, ERP, etc) were boxed with printed manuals!.

In this case the box have the VisualWorks CD and the ObjectStudio CD (non commercial) versions. Also, one nice datasheet to each product.

If anyone from Cincom is reading this post I would know if the commercial versions comes with printed manuals, just by curiosity.


May be some day, if business permit, I could buy the commercial version.

By now I'm very impressed, as I told on my previous post, and I continue learning on my free time (Currently about toolbars, menus and other things of UI building).

My current goal is port my Aida/Scribo Console to VisualWorks under the MIT license.

Thanks Cincom by sending me the package of NC version!

VisualWorks first steps

As I've developed the Scribo-Console, and taking in account that Aida/Web is available on several different Smalltalk's I will try to make the same with the console. An excellent excuse to explore others Smalltalk’s!.

Then, the list of possible ports of Scribo-Console is the following: VisualWorks - Smalltalk/X - Gemstone - ObjectStudio - Dolphin.

I'm not sure if will make all, but at least will try with the Smalltalk’s that run on Linux. Not sure with the others, because I don’t like to work on Windows.

To start I selected VisualWorks, because I give it a try on the past, version 5 if not bad remember, and willing to try it again, being that is from Aida/Web comes.

I started installing VWNC on my Xubuntu desktop and, after a few adjustments, is running ok.

Such adjustments were two:

1. After burn the ISO image on the CD, I needed to copy all the CD contents on the hard disk to make work the installation. Don’t tried much things, simply copied and installed and it worked.

2. The startup script, named VisualNC need to be bash, not csh, then I replaced the first sentence (#!/bin/csh) with this one: #!/bin/bash.

And VWNC started smoothly.

First thing I noticed was the fonts a bit smaller to my current resolution, then I switched to the biggest (from Settings VW itself). And also I set the look and feel to Mac (Is the only way of have one of these here!).

Two things caught my attention: the amazing speed to load, open windows, saving, etc and the superb documentation of VW. I think that any product that play on the major leagues must have complete documentation, and VW have it.

After starting VWNC by first time I saved my own image to not broke the original, and then installed the parcel of Aida/Web. Also I searched something to have the code colored and found RBCodeHighlighting on Environment Enhancements category of Parcel Manager.

Having now a comfortable environment to work in, I started the port. As is a tiny app, on the Squeak version I did the UI on the same main class, with Morphic. Then the challenge here is learn a bit about the UI Painter (When I first tried VW, some years ago, I completed the Walk Through, and now I plan to base the work reading again this doc).

Porting some methods, an important thing I noticed, being that I comes from Squeak with no namespaces in mind, is the need of put the namespace name before the class name, as in the attached image: Swazoo.SwazooServer singleton sites (Thanks Janko by point it).

Well, is time to go back to real work, and wait having a bit of free time to continue playing with VW and the console port!