Blog

We had some complains about the many steps, which were required to register a new account and then to buy an item. Now, a customer can simply register or login on the fly during her or his purchase. This improves usability of the system a lot and benefits the customers as well as the mandantors.

We are proud to announce the availability of Snakeworlds from our customers website. The game is available for only 7.99€ and can by downloaded instantly after the payment with PayPal, a free demo is available, too. We'd like to thank Patrick Kooman, developer of snakeworlds, for his contribution and trust in our product. We wish all potential customers a lot of fun with this nice game!

We spent the last year with development on all components.
On the downside, we spent a lot of work on the client application, but it still isn't in a presentable state. To fill this gap, we decided to add another interface to our system, which may be interesting for some customers, by accessing Jade:DS with encrypted http-data. Snakeworlds will be the first product to use this interface and will go online for sales during the next weeks.
So, what has been done with the system in that long period of time? A lot. We added sophisticated features for system mails for example. There are a lot of system mail hooks, which can be supplied each with customized and hierarchical mail templates. Speaking of mails, Jade:DS now offers a complete mail infrastructure for vendors, e.g. they can create and assign aritrary email adresses to administrator accounts and mail can be accessed with a web mailer, per IMAP or POP3.
As a first working payment interface, we have integrated PayPal. A customer now can pay the product instantly with his PayPal account or, even without registering, with his credit card. A payment is reported to the system withing minutes and automatically unlocks the ordered products.

After announcing a wxWindows based multiplatform client, technical issues brought us back to a - at least partly - native implementation. There were heavy issues in bringing together wxWindows and cairo. It became impossible to use cairo within wxWindows without converting the windows color order to the generic one of wxWindows - which wxWindows will convert back internally before displaying. We now choose an approach, where a fundamentally simple own GUI toolkit is developed, which encapsulates the cairo based window drawing, abstracting it from a platform dependent base class. Due to the fact, that the needs for the client are very well defined, and the toolkit is not ment to be used as a public interface, this should be a fast to finish task, which gives us full control over the visual appearance of the client on all supported platforms. Still, linux and Mac OS X are the aimed platforms. Development of the client should now progress fast, so please check back for updates and first screenshots very soon.

Yesterday we finished the initial version of wxArchive, the GUI tool to build revision files for the Jade:DS archive system. This tool reads the same configuration files as the command line version, making it easy to switch between both versions. In the next release, 1.1, wxArchive will replace the command line tool completly by gaining a command line interface itself.
The GUI tool presents you a tree view of the project directories, showing all files assigned to the project. You can easily add and remove files and with some single steps, you can build a new revision file and upload it via ftp directly to the Jade:DS server.
With this, the work on the GUI client, which will be build upon wxWidgets, too, has begun. We hope to have some presentable results very soon, so stay tuned and visit us regularly.