Arthur Fuller
fuller.artful at gmail.com
Mon Oct 21 19:36:46 CDT 2013
I have been dutifully recording the votes as they come in. The current stats are: Total Votes: 15 Ribbons: Yes = 5 No = 10 Navigation Pane: Yes = 1 No = 14 Perhaps I ought to have included custom Toolbars, but since they've been in Access since forever, I chose to concentrate upon the features introduced in Access 2007+. I'm not quite ready to close this poll; I'll give it another week, maybe, to await votes from recalcitrants; but thus far, and given the expertise of those who have chosen to respond so far, the overwhelming evidence suggests that these two new features have gone almost unanimously ignored among the developers community. I am no MS apologist let alone evangelist, but these stats do give one pause. I can see reasons why these two options have been made available, but the fact seems to me that the Access team dropped the ball in both courts. Rather than shipping Yet Another Version of NorthWind, the team failed to provide examples of customization of both objects, and to illustrate how these might work in real-world apps. One or two add-in developers have bitten the bullet and provided clumsy methods to customize the ribbon and the NavBar, but the point remains: the Access team has seriously failed to provide examples of how to render our Apps cool. As previously stated, I'll hold the ultimate votes for about another week, and then post the final results. I encourage listers who have not yet voted to do so soon. I have no interest in skewing the stats this way or that, and I am grateful for the respondents' votes thus far. I'm plugging each pair of votes into a spreadsheet, and each time I receive a new pair of votes I add a row to the XL range. Thanks to all you voters so far. Before I close this poll, I shall wait a week or so, and then post the final results. So far, these two new "features" seem to have been wasted upon the developers' communtity. Two possible explanations: a) too many of us have not seen the light; and b) the Access team has missed the boat (or was ordered to miss the boat by highers-up in the MS sphere). Either way, I am pursuing this in two interests: a) how to help Access developers find a new path, given that MS has abandoned us; b) by identifying the weaknesses in the current Access "solutions", to provide a growth path to a new development platform. Currently I make no apologies for my allegiance to AlphaSoftware.com. It is leagues above Access on every possible measure. I am currently writing several docs about the transition from Access to Alpha Anywhere, which shall soon be available on their site. Let me state this at the outset: I receive no money from Alpha. It's privately held so obviously I own no shares. I am un-compromised in any way, with Alpha or any other company. I call them as I see them, and this concerns movies, HBO series, and software development tools. Just to prove the point, here are my totally disinterested votes (for readers who don't understand the term "disinterested", it means that I own no shares) for the greatest TV series ever made, followed by my votes for the Greatest Software ever created (and in this category, you must understand this as equivalent to the Baroque then Classic then Romantic eras). The greatest TV series ever made, as viewed by Arthur... 1. The Sopranos, which led to everything else. 2. The Wire, in which I fell in love with Felicia Pearson, and also in a different way, with Idris Elba. 3. Breaking Bad, which has so many great character portraits that it's hard to know where to begin. The obvious choice is Mr. Cranston but it extends much deeper than that. 4. Boardwalk Empire, starring Steve Buscemi and created by Terence Winter. The history of PC software, as viewed by Arthur... 1. Apple SOS. 2. Dan Bricklin's VisiCalc, which changed the world. 3. Gary Killdall's CP/M, which also changed the world. Sadly, he chose not to take a meeting with the IBM execs who flew to Albaquerque to meet with him, because he was busy flying his personal plane at the time, and thereby forewent a moment that could have changed history. 4. DOS, purchased from Seattle Products by Bill Gates for a mere $50K, and marketed to IBM for inclusion in their first PC, and a tiny slice of the action thereafter. Brilliant, Bill! 5. Apple steals the Mouse technology from PARC and releases the late lamented first release. 6. Suddenly, everyone realizes that Mr. Joy was right (the mouse was Right and Righteous, and things realign themselves. Jobs was right and the GUI and mouse took over the world. Even upon its initial lousy entrance, the die were cast, and the command line was over. 7. MS bastardizes Apple, who in turn bastardized Xerox, but I'll leave all that to the history of lawyers. 8. MS bastardizes the Apple experience, but manages to win most of the corporate and personal world, despite its shoddy implementations. 9. Open Source emerges, albeit very slowly, but MS senses a thread to its jugular and presents a weak response -- which works in corporate America, since they collectively represent a whore-house of recent Chinese immigrants, some of whom have legal qualifications and some of whom arrived in a shipping container. Most go to work in underpaid garment factories off Spadina, and live in primitive dormatorys not much further away. These people (I have done some research but do not pretend to exptertise) choose to exploit the recent arriving Chinese -- I use that word as a generic appellation for the numerous Chinese who arrive here: I know how to speak a couple of dialects, but there are two hundred more to learn, and frankly, most Taiwanese or Hong Kong or Shanghai people have the same problem -- which creates for us a sharing experience. And this is my focus: I do not want to declare war on anyone, either by force or by economic means. Call me a hippie, if you wish, but I feel that this is the best approach. This entails solutions to which I have no ready response. I fear for the life of the cable channels -- well actually that is not true -- I am glad to see them die after years and years of forking us -- but what I meant was that they have no chance in the future world. I have a vision of the teleUnivsrse in which traditiona; cable has no place, and neither do advertisers, except in special places which I shall explain momentarily. Consider me as the consumer of the future. I have several interests: BBC, CBC, Al-Jareera, HBO and Tennis.com. No single TV provider can offer these and only these to me. Therefore I go to NetFlix. Oops, I forgot my passions for snooker and 8-ball and 9-ball. In sum, no TV provider in Canada or elsewhere can deliver these and only these channels. Therefore, TV as we knew it is dead. I have no glimmer what this means in terms of marketing etc. I am concerned solely with what I want to view, and the collection of market-delivered channels fails me big-time. Let me re-iterate in my most specific terms (it doesn't matter whether you agree with my choices, but rather that you decide your own choices: that is the point! No more broadcasting, but rather narrow-casting). IMO, the whole concept of Channels is obsolete. I want to move beyond this and say instead, "Anything by Terence Winter or Chris Haddock, etc. is of immediate interest". To be sure, I don't want CBCTV to dry up and die. But I do want us Canadians to realize the quality of TV we are delivering to the world. Let me cite just a few: da Vinci's Inquest da Vinci's City Hall Intelligence Republic of Doyle Heartland I am at work on a project that I have vague hopes that will measure up to these landmarks. It's a high bar to jump but I hope to at least equal these measures. Frankly, I'm thinking that it will cost too much to make, but I remain compelled to write it. The history of the Chinese in Canada remains to be told. A couple of writers have tackled this and that aspect, but that is IMO not even close to enough. So apparently it falls upon me to write this ugly history. I accept that burden. I realize that I am far from the best possible writer of this story, but since no one else is stepping forward then I guess it's on me to tell these stories. Many of them are sickening. The things that Canadians did to Chinese workers, imported to blast the way through mountains, to carve a way from Toronto to Vancouver... the more I read, the more I puke. This is stuff that needs to be told. And maybe I'm not the greatest story-teller but someone has to begin this story, and it would appear to be me, despite my inadequate tools for the trade. I have a few tools of the trade, but more importantly, I have nothing to lose. This results in the ultimate freedom. I can call them as I see them, and no one can pressure me this way or that to call it differently. This, I have just realized, is Freedom! I am beyond self-interest, other-interest, and so on. I think that I have achieved a new leverl hitherto unknown to me -- a level beyond personal interests and investment in this or that position -- a level that observes the politically/emotionally invested positions as just another position on the 3D planes of opiinion, which vaguely correspond to the 3D manifestations of these phenomenae. Way beyond me. I think that it's time to go to sleep right now. On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 1:01 PM, Rocky Smolin <rockysmolin at bchacc.com>wrote: > Do I detect a pattern here? > > DO you suppose MS has looked at similar data and wondered why developers > are > not customizing their own ribbons or nav panes? > > Rocky > > > -----Original Message----- > From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com > [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Brad Marks > Sent: Monday, October 21, 2013 8:09 AM > To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving > Subject: Re: [AccessD] Poll: Custom Ribbons and Custom Navigation Panes > > Arthur, > > No > > No > > Brad Marks > Black Forest LTD > Owatonna, MN > > > -----Original Message----- > From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com on behalf of Arthur Fuller > Sent: Sat 10/19/2013 10:56 PM > To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving > Subject: [AccessD] Poll: Custom Ribbons and Custom Navigation Panes > > I'm curious as to how many of you Access developers have used either custom > ribbons or custom navigation panes in apps you've developed since these > features appeared in Access 2007. > > To get a better idea of the big picture, it would help if you'd vote Yes or > No. Then I could do a count. > > As for me, I have to answer No to both categories. > > -- > Arthur > -- > AccessD mailing list > AccessD at databaseadvisors.com > http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd > Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com > > -- > This message was scanned by ESVA and is believed to be clean. > Click here to report this message as spam. > http://h0stname/cgi-bin/learn-msg.cgi?id=7744428CCA.D6525 > > > > > -- > AccessD mailing list > AccessD at databaseadvisors.com > http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd > Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com > -- Arthur