[AccessD] A favor

Gustav,

» why couldn't we vote for the current top item which seems to be much
more heavy weight than yours - ahem - "yet another progress bar", even
though, admittedly, it appears to be quite fancy? «

The progress bar isn't mine.  It was written by my co-worker for an
application he has written for the company we both work for.  He wrote
it in a bit of competitive spirit since I'm also assembling an article
for CodeProject.

I asked that you vote for his article instead of the one that's
currently in first place because, well, if my co-worker gets the
highest number of votes then he'll win the prize for the month which
is quite substantial.  Yes, you're absolutely right; that other
fellow's article is much more "heavy weight" than my co-worker's.

I am asking this as a favor since I know my co-worker, Dave, would be
thrilled.  He has done some terrific work since he started here in
November.  He was hired and given the very thankless task of fixing a
project that has been worked on for over seven years here: a
proprietary application that performs the work performed currently
performed by graphic artists.

Printron Engravers is a printing services company.  We don't actually
do the printing; we prepare the plates.  Our plates are used in
printing corrugated cardboard cartons; for example, the cases in which
packages of paper towels are packed.  You'll see these cases in the
big grocery stores.  Those are the simple ones.  We also prepare full
color fancy-schmancy plates for beer cases or cartons that hold baby
cribs and the like.

The plates for the "simple" cartons are prepared by our pre-press
department using Adobe Illustrator and Acrobat.  But our boss had an
idea seven or eight years ago that a program could be written to
automate the layout of these "simple" cartons because they involve no
more than a single color of ink and they have mostly text printed on
them plus standard company or product logos and various insignias for
carton strength and such.

Well, there've been a succession of programmers that have worked on
this thing.  I knew the programmer that was working on it before.  It
wasn't until they hired Dave that something substantial and workable
was put together.  He persuaded them to essentially start from scratch
so that he could build the program his way rather than patch the
existing one which had been a mish-mash of a whole succession of
coders.

The promise of this program isn't so much that the company will be
able to fire a raft of graphic artists as that we can steal business
from our competitors while keeping the same staff or even hiring more
as our customers realize that we do a heck of a lot more than the
simple stuff.

Dave is single, 30 years old, a former Air Force mechanic, and a very
solid fellow.  He's the type that will get an idea at home and will
whip up a program at home to show to the bosses here.  He did that a
couple months ago to produce a 3-D visualization program that takes
the results from his carton layout program, folds it up, and allows
the user to rotate it through any axis to see that all the pieces are
placed in their correct places.

This 3-D vis program actually showed the bosses that the main customer
we're trying to impress had been specifying the placement of something
on their cartons wrongly; that is, upside-down in relation to other
items on the carton.

I must say, that this 3-D thing that Dave came up with has gotten a
lot of people excited.  One day the president, the vice-president of
sales, the account manager for the customer we're trying to impress
with this program, and several of the people in customer support (the
ones who'll use this program the most) were gathered in Dave's cube
for a demo and they were hooting and hollering and laughing.  It was
very distracting.

So, I told you all of that to re-setup my request that you folks help
out this very straight arrow guy who has written his first little
article for Code Project.  Before I made my request his article had
already gotten enough votes for him to be in clear 2nd place.  That's
when I got the idea for doing a little electioneering on AccessD.

Sorry that this is so long, Gustav, but I figured that you might like
some background.

Steve Erbach
Neenah, WI


On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 1:37 AM, Gustav Brock <Gustav at cactus.dk> wrote:
> Hi Steve
>
>  I'm not a member so I'm kind of off site, but - with all respect - why couldn't we vote for the current top item which seems to be much more heavy weight than yours - ahem - "yet another progress bar", even though, admittedly, it appears to be quite fancy?
>
>  Further, my teacher at the old GUI school learned me that a GUI should not be fancy - unless of course if the GUI itself and not the application is the message ...
>
>  /gustav
>
>
>
>
>  -----Original Message-----
>  From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
>  [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Steve Erbach
>  Sent: Monday, May 12, 2008 1:08 PM
>  To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
>  Subject: [AccessD] A favor
>
>  Dear Group,
>
>  If any of you are CodeProject.com members, could you do me a favor?  A
>  co-worker of mine has written a VB article that's in the running for
>  best VB article for April.  Currently he's in 2nd place.  Would you
>  mind logging into CodeProject, go to the link for "Your favourite
>  VB.NET articles from April", and vote for "ColorBar - A Gradient
>  Colored ProgressBar" by Copper?  I think my co-worker, Dave Behnke,
>  would be thrilled.