For those of us who use eDeveloper, DST usually stands for Development Saving Time – After all eDeveloper is all about saving development and deployment time and efforts.

For all other developers out there, DST simply stands for Daylight Saving Time.

The big news around Daylight Saving Time is that the DST in the U.S. was extended by about four weeks, following the U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005.
As of this year, 2007, the DST will start on March 11, 2007, (three weeks earlier) and end on November 4, 2007.

This modification would naturally impact various applications utilizing timestamp-based mechanisms.

Fortunately, in eDeveloper, all system Date & Time related manipulations are made transparent to the developer by fully relying on the operating system date & time settings.

This means that unless the application was designed in a way that manipulates date & time values with explicit DST calculations, and given that the operating system on which the eDeveloper application is running is tuned to the new DST, the application will not be affected in any way by the upcoming DST period extension.

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The launch of eDeveloper DiscoveryTM is creating quite a stir in both the world of iPods and more importantly in the world of Application Development.

Since launch almost a week ago we have had literally hundreds of downloads of the new software development suite with new users coming from all over the world. Not just that but we’ve seen developers from as young as 12 up to 65 wanting to give our powerful tool a try.

New users are finding out that Discovery is the introductory-level eDeveloper edition that lets you explore and learn the capabilities of our code-free application development kit.

If you’ve not got it yet, getting started today. To build an eDeveloper Discovery application, simply download the FREE Discovery Studio package. (and enter for a chance to win an iPod)

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eDeveloper and Discovery are revolutionary in two primary ways,

1. System / Platform and Database Compatibility.

2. Ease of Use.

We have put together a number of tutorials for you to see in action and learn for yourself how best to create applications in the fastest possible time.

For eDeveloper Discovery Users we recently uploaded new tutorials.

eDeveloper Installation Video

eDeveloper Tutorial Video

We will also shortly be publishing on this blog a 10 Lesson Video Series. Stay tuned !

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We are always interested to get feedback from our Magicians (users of Magic Solutions) and get excited when they take their use of Magic software to the wider community to help and assist others in getting the most out of their software investment.

We’ve been following Craig Martin on the Yahoo eDeveloper group for a while and following his agreement we are proud to post some of his own Magic software tutorials that can be used alongside our own.

Craig Martin’s Practical Magic links to a range of text and movie tutorials

Craig Martin’s Hot Fudge links to a collection of gadgets and components for you to extend the use of your application development toolkits.

If you’ve produced your own tutorials or gadgets for the community we want to hear from you.

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In eDeveloper V10, you can set project modules. This collection of modules provides you with a visual representation of the related projects and a quick way to move from one project to another.

You can add a project as a module in two ways:

• Creating a new project and adding it as a module in an opened project. In the New Project dialog box, you select the Add as module in current project check box to add your project as a module in a current project.

• Adding a module to a project. You open an existing project and from the Project menu, select the Add Module option.

To move between modules, you can open the View menu, select Navigator, and from the Navigator pane, select Modules.

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A common request for help we get is; How do I Define Reusable Data Objects?

So here is a quick step by step guide:

Creating a field model

1. Go to the Model repository (Shift+F1), and move to the desired location.

2. Press F4 (Edit->Create Line).

3. Type in the name of the model (here it is “Status Code”).

4. Select the class of Field.

5. Select the attribute you need. For a field model, this would be one of your basic data types: alpha, numeric, date, time, blob, ActiveX, etc.

6. Now go to the model properties pane

(Alt+Enter) and set the properties you need.

Details: In this section, you can specify the length and format of the field in its picture. You can also specify the valid values of the field, either as a range (i.e. A-Z) or as discrete values. Here we have a 1-character uppercase field, with 4 possible values.

Input: You can specify a program that will appear when the user presses F5 or double-clicks (zoom), to aid in selecting a value.

Appearance: Here you can attach a help screen, tooltip, or prompt to show on the prompt line.

Style: This section specifies how the data will appear depending on where it is displayed.

In this case, our status code will appear as a radio button on most GUI display screens, but will show up as a combo box if it is on a GUI table.

Def/Null: Determines how nulls are used, and if the field has a default value.

Storage/SQL: Here you can specify how the data will be stored in the DBMS.

As you can see, the field models give you a lot of control over how data will be formatted and used in your application. Once the field model is created, you can use it for any instance of this type of data. In this case, we would use it for the status code as it exists in records, as it is passed as a parameter, and in temporary variables in programs.

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We’ve searched our help desk for common questions, and this one pops up quite often, How do I Define Reusable Interface Objects?

One of the challenges of today’s programming is maintaining a consistent look and feel across hundreds of open windows, browsers, and reports. Gone are the days of simple text green screens; today you have a choice of hundreds of fonts, sizes, and colors. Setting these choices for each object is horribly time-consuming, and keeping them consistent or making changes is next to impossible, if they are set on an object by - object basis.

Fortunately, eDeveloper makes this sort of thing incredibly easy. eDeveloper contains a robust system of models, which can be used to define the look and feel of every interface object, including text fields, radio buttons, tables, table columns, print formats, Web browser screens, and Windows windows.

When these are set up as models, using them is easy: you just choose the model you want while designing your form. Changing them is even easier: you change the model, and all items that use that model automatically change.

Here we will give an example of setting up a simple model for a field prompt.

Creating a control model

1. Go to the Model repository (Shift+F1), and move to the desired location.

2. Press F4 (Edit->Create Line).

3. Type in the name of the model (here it is “Required Field Prompt”).

4. Select the class you need:

• GUI Display: for any online screen control, which is what we are using in our example.

• GUI Output: for most formatted reports

• Text-based: for text-only output going to another product or older printer.

• Browser: for Browser controls.

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