Modernising Uniface - part 2

I posted last week about Modernising Uniface, which included my comments about Theo Neeskens post on UnifaceInfo.com.  I received some comments that I was talking purely about the IDE, and not the language itself.  So let me start by stating that this post of about the modernisation of the IDE, and not the language itself.

This time the post is all about the effort it took to make the seemingly simple move from grey backgrounds (which psychologically make software feel outdated) white clean, clear, white backgrounds, like this...

For both of these dialogs, the older grey version sits behind the newer white version.  You can also see the buttons have changed, but we've been promised more about those in the next blog post.

The main problems they hand with this change included...

• Forms having index, foreground or background colour set
• Painted entities having index, foreground or background colour set (and being painted at least 3 characters wide)
• Entities having foreground or background colour set in the model
• Grids not having borders
• Multi-occurrence entities not having borders

A couple of these have been resolved by making new properties available, but all of them required fix programs to find the affected items and update them to the new properties.  All of the tools have been provided in a zip file, to be downloaded and modified if you wish, but not supported by Uniface and used at your own risk.

I've had my hands on Uniface 9.7 now (which I hadn't when I wrote the first post) and I can say that it definitely feels more up-to-date, and I agree that the white backgrounds and blue buttons are a large part of that.  We've actually been changing our web offering to a similar colour scheme over the past few months, so I can't disagree with their choice!

Again, the full blog post is definitely worth checking out... Modernizing Uniface 9.7, Part 2.

Summary: Uniface is modernising it's IDE, and we're not going to have to wait for Uniface 10 to get in on the action.