Category: SQLEditor

I’ve been working recently on integrating a registration system into SQLEditor (sorry).

Unfortunately I kind of need to make some money out of my software and so people have to pay for it. I really wish this wasn’t the case but sadly it is.

So I now have an online store powered by swreg. If you visit the SQLEditor page you will now see a couple of purchasing options in the right column and further options are an a subsequent screen. It looks fairly close to the rest of the site and swreg offers better fraud prevention than paypal, particularly for credit cards.

The complexities of integrating everything together are quite great, which suprised me a bit. I was hoping for something easy, but it required a lot of steps to get everything pretty much working.

• Sign up to online store
• Add products
• Create templates for shopping basket
• Create serial number system
• integrate serial number system into application and online store

Although I won’t need to do this for any future software that I develop. Most of it was a one-off cost.

One oddity is that the serial number code is written in ANSI C. This is a bit odd, because most of the code that I have been writing recently has been either Objective C, Java or PHP. But ANSI C proved to be the best way of using the same codebase for both the server and client side components.

Hopefully lots of people will love and therefore buy the licenses.

I’ve recently been trying to write a serial number system for SQLEditor. I’m also looking for a new name for it. It was pointed out that the current name is generic and difficulty to pronounce, plus there is already at least one other “SQLEditor” out there already. Suggestions are welcome!

But back to the serial number thing. If I could remember more of the maths that I learnt at university I would be happier, but as I tend to do I had forgotten most of the stuff that I don’t use, retaining only the bits I do use (Vectors primarily, plus some other stuff).

Obviously serial number values end up in base 36 (0-9, A-Z), but other than that the problem occurred on how exactly to represent them. I need to have a link between the username and the serial number because that’s one of the methods implemented to discourage copying. If you see someone else’s name on the thing.

I’m currently looking at a graphic convertor like delay (it will wait 20 or 30 seconds at startup after the trial period is ended) rather than a complete lockout. Because I think (a) it’s nicer to do it that way and (b) it offers people a chance to experience the feature set even after 30 days have expired.

One thing I have noticed is that there are very few descriptions of how serial number systems actually work, probably to prevent people reverse engineering them and creating generators.

Of course the most secure system is one that receives a license key directly from a server, but I think that could be too intrusive. I guess we’ll see how well the first version works out.

New features for Beta 7 include “crows-feet” style referential cardinality indication and a new way of exporting foreign keys; following a suggestion they will be placed after the tables as soon as I write the code anyway, the parser is already capable, but the exporter is not.

Finally Beta 7 will also offer selectable colors on the fields, more transparency and prettier connector drawing. Possibly also table type for mysql as well as a new export system for creating databases via scripts on remote servers. More later.

I just realised that NSLog allows parameters. I’d previously been using

NSLog([NSString stringWithFormat:@"%d",randomVar]) ...

But now I realise that the I don’t really need to do this. A simple call to NSLog will work as well.

NSLog(@"%d",randomVar);

It still isn’t as easy as php or even java, but it’s shorter and tidier and so better.

Well, I feel much better today. I’ve thought about it a bit more and I realise how very lucky I was that I found about the bug before the thing got a public release. I’m already working on some ideas on how to fix it. More on that as I think it up.

This really shows the importance of testing stuff. So thank you to everyone who has tried SQLEditor in its various versions.

Yet again the fact that I’m developing on Mac OS X 10.2.8 is causing problems. Bruce tried out a copy of SQLEditor (Cocoa) on 10.3 (Panther) and it doesn’t seem to work at all. You can’t seem to add objects to the canvas which is the key requirement. Most of the other functionality is based on this particular activity. I’ve looked quite carefully at the code and I really can’t see where the problem is. There isn’t anything odd going on.

This is really bad news, especially after the previous problems that occurred with the java version on 10.3 (which was the reason I wrote a cocoa version in the first place). I’m really not sure what to do.

This has made me a bit depressed because I’ve been working really hard on SQLEditor recently to prepare it for release.

It’s really annoying that there isn’t better compatibility between Mac OS X versions.

I’ll try to write some more about what I’m going to do about this tomorrow.