How To Be More Productive With http://textcontrol.com
This week: The Support Forum

After a good two months of development, the new TX Text Control web site was finally released yesterday. In the next six weeks, we are going to be taking a detailed look about how you can be more productive using http://textcontrol.com. This is part one of the six part series.

The most visited place on our web site is the support forum. Therefore, we decided to invest particular attention in this part of the web site.

The basic functionality - that has often been praised - has remained, but several features have been added.

Firstly, you will notice that the forum (as with the rest of the web site) maximizes itself to your browser size. This means that you get maximum space to view, post and search the past posts.

Secondly, there are now two different view forms. Either you can select 'threaded view' to see the messages displayed as they were in the old web site, but more excitingly, there is now an option 'flat view' that enables you to see all posts on one page. This offers a magnificent overview when you are searching the archives to find an answer to your question. Previously, you would have had to painfully go through every post in an interesting thread one by one to extract the information that you were looking for. Now, once you have clicked on 'flat view', the contents of the entire thread are visible.

Please note that these customization settings that you make to the support forum are saved in a cookie, so that when you return a few days later, you will be presented with the exactly same settings as you previously had - well, as long as you do not deleted the cookie in your browser, that is.

And finally, a search box has been added to every page. At the top right of each page you can directly enter search terms to search either only in the support forum - the default setting - or over the entire web site. It is often interesting to do a search in a localized area and then, should you not find what you are looking for, broaden the scope of your search to, for example, the entire web site.

So that we can continue to improve on your experience of our web site, we urge you to comment on the new layout. Please use this thread.

Visual Fox Pro Sample Applications

While we were researching for the new web site, it became apparent that there was a lack of Visual Fox Pro sample applications and documentation relating directly to Visual Fox Pro. Indeed, one enthusiastic Visual Fox Pro user posted the following into the forum:

"Just one sample application initiating documents, saving them to fields, restoring them, creating headers and footers, printing, inserting graphics etc in the most basic way would get us half way up the learning curve without hassling support. Visual Fox Pro programmers are a supportive lot, and an area where we could upload samples would help us help each other."

On reviewing this idea, we decided to openly ask all Visual Fox Pro users whether they would send us their sample applications so that we can publish them in the new online Source Code Library.

We are also preparing some documentation that is directly applicable to Visual Fox Pro programming.

So, if you are an enthusiastic Visual Fox Pro user and would like to help build the Visual Fox Pro developers community, then please e-mail your sample application (and a bit of documentation, if you have written any) to mailto:webmaster@textcontrol.com. We will consider all contributions for publication.

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