I use Morfik 2.0 just about everyday. It is a great tool, a great product. One thing I can't stand in the product, though, are those obnoxious sliding panels on the side and bottom of the main window.
Why should things keep moving in my screen when I haven't clicked on anything is totally beyond me. I use a decent computer to run Morfik AppsBuilder 2.0: a Core Duo with 2GB of RAM and a nice enough NVidia graphics adapter with dedicated memory and still those panels are annoying when you are just moving your mouse around and just accidentally happen to move over one of their tabs.
Worse thing is that I see no reason why the panels should not require me to click on them in order to come on screen. If I have to click on a tab to make a panel visible, it stands to reason that they will only appear when I want to see them, while if they just come up whenever the mouse moves over them, they can be triggered accidentally.
The funny thing is that almost everybody I know complains to me about these panels, and I sypathise entirely with them. I hope that in the upcoming 2.1 release Morfik either changes this annoying behavior or at least makes it optional.
What about you? Do you like the current behavior of sliding the panels into view or does it bother you too?
Friday, February 27, 2009
Friday, February 20, 2009
Morfik Reports: a great idea that still needs a little work
Morfik reports are a great idea! I have lost count of the number of times that some complained to me of how bad a receipt of invoice looked when printed from a browser.
Morfik reports by using Adobe's PDF (Portable Document Format) file format to represent reports allows clear viewing and printing of actual reports, without the default headers and footers added by all browsers. Add to this the fact that you can save, store and email your report to other people and you have got a sure winner for providing lightweight reporting for web applications.
Morfik reports are ideal for generating small printable documents such as invoices and receipts directly from your own web application, without needing to bring in the cost of a full fledged reporting solution, which can be pretty expensive, to the cost of your solution.
In version 2.0 of Morfik AppsBuilder a few bugs seem to have crept into the reporting engine, making more sophisticated reports come out with some issues. Hopefully, most of these issues will be fixed when 2.1 comes out, allowing Morfik reports to become the great tool they have the potential to be.
Morfik reports by using Adobe's PDF (Portable Document Format) file format to represent reports allows clear viewing and printing of actual reports, without the default headers and footers added by all browsers. Add to this the fact that you can save, store and email your report to other people and you have got a sure winner for providing lightweight reporting for web applications.
Morfik reports are ideal for generating small printable documents such as invoices and receipts directly from your own web application, without needing to bring in the cost of a full fledged reporting solution, which can be pretty expensive, to the cost of your solution.
In version 2.0 of Morfik AppsBuilder a few bugs seem to have crept into the reporting engine, making more sophisticated reports come out with some issues. Hopefully, most of these issues will be fixed when 2.1 comes out, allowing Morfik reports to become the great tool they have the potential to be.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Hosting Morfik applications
The subject of hosting an XApp came up, recently, in both the Morfik forums and the MorfikDev community forum. This is a very interesting subject which I think merits some consideration.
Morfik uses native binary compilation for its server side components. This makes it an ideal tool for creating lightweight and fast server side processes but it also makes it quite shared-hosting unfriendly. This is a very important fact for when you are designing your commercial roadmap for a business using Morfik.
If you need to have shared-host compatibility, you should be looking at creating purely browser applications with Morfik, where you can benefit from its visual designer and compiler technology and using other popular tools, such as PHP, for the server side programming. Morfik browser applications can be deployed through any server an can issue XMLHTTPRequests against any server.
When you decide to write your entire application using Morfik you need, in fact, to be ready to make, in fact, a commitment to a higher cost deployment environment where you will need to have at least a virtual private server. This kind of solution isn't very expensive these days, but anywhere near the $7 to $10 per month for which you can find shared-host solutions.
Morfik Technologies itself has been developing a special shared-host deployment environment for Morfik XApps, for some time now. A recent post in one of the Morfik forums containing a general roadmap for the near future details that this service should come online sometime in the second half of the year. I guess we'll have to wait and see this service works and performs to know if there is finally a low-cost way of deploying simple Morfik applications.
Morfik uses native binary compilation for its server side components. This makes it an ideal tool for creating lightweight and fast server side processes but it also makes it quite shared-hosting unfriendly. This is a very important fact for when you are designing your commercial roadmap for a business using Morfik.
If you need to have shared-host compatibility, you should be looking at creating purely browser applications with Morfik, where you can benefit from its visual designer and compiler technology and using other popular tools, such as PHP, for the server side programming. Morfik browser applications can be deployed through any server an can issue XMLHTTPRequests against any server.
When you decide to write your entire application using Morfik you need, in fact, to be ready to make, in fact, a commitment to a higher cost deployment environment where you will need to have at least a virtual private server. This kind of solution isn't very expensive these days, but anywhere near the $7 to $10 per month for which you can find shared-host solutions.
Morfik Technologies itself has been developing a special shared-host deployment environment for Morfik XApps, for some time now. A recent post in one of the Morfik forums containing a general roadmap for the near future details that this service should come online sometime in the second half of the year. I guess we'll have to wait and see this service works and performs to know if there is finally a low-cost way of deploying simple Morfik applications.
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