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AD Software offers various programming and consulting services locally in Perth, Western Australia and via telecommuting to other states of Australia and internationally. Due to our location in Australia, rates are extremely competitive with US and European consultants. As of October 2003, hourly rates vary from US $50 to $80 depending on project size.
We specialise in taking on the "different" projects requiring lateral thinking.
For more information please email services@oofile.com.au.
Convert C and C++ software between Mac and Windows, providing rewrites as you require, eg: from MFC to the PowerPlant or Cocoa frameworks on the Mac.
Help you use our PP2MFC porting solution which provides PowerPlant API's under Windows, letting you keep the vast majority of your business logic written just to PowerPlant. Over 98% common source code has been achieved for typical forms-based business applications.
Extend PP2MFC or develop other custom porting solutions based on a deep understanding of both Mac and Windows architecture.
Help your software design become something that sells.
From something as "trivial" as a simpler search screen through to complete shrink-wrap product design, we can help.
Help refine your customer descriptions and scenarios for how your product is used.
Review designs for usability, describing areas where users may be confused or intimidated by your software.
Enlarge your options - we can provide alternative user interface designs and feasibility studies for how to implement them.
Make your software comfortable for hours of use:
A quote from a user of KIDMAP: "...it just doesn't get in my way."
Help you design software that frees up your expert users to get on with
their jobs,
rather than spending hours helping their co-workers struggle with the computer.
OOD and software architecture design and review: either creating designs for you based on your ideas and written requirements or providing feedback on your current design.
Mentor your staff with the background of a decade's OO development experience and mentoring dozens of junior programmers. With twenty years in software development, Andy can also help experienced software developers from the Structured Development paradigm migrate to the object-oriented world.
C++ programming services on Mac, Windows and Unix.
Develop applications using PowerPlant® and MFC® application frameworks on Mac and Windows.
Consult on software processes, helping you to agile processes that make developing maintainable, robust software easier. Andy is known for putting support departments out of business.
Quicktime Programming including developing custom components and authoring software to build movies.
Review your site for usability.
Automate site rebuilds - do you have scripts that take 40 hours to rebuild your index pages? One user loves their 35 minute rebuild that lets them update suburbs within the space of a phone call, keeping their customers happy.
Replace slow scripted solutions with custom programs
Help process and generate XML including the easiest solution on the market for generating printable reports and simple web pages from XML data.
MYOB™ - advice on using, configuring and sorting out problems with this popular Accounting package, from someone who's used it in small business for over 7 years and has the deep understanding that comes from having developed accounting software himself.
Information management, database design and general advice on getting value out of computers in business (or when you should NOT be using computers).
Andy Dent worked as a Senior Software Engineer on this Windows-based product. Apart from advanced GUI interfaces, he played a major role in rewriting their object-relational mapping layer using SQL Server.
He also enhanced the OOFILE Report Writer to print images in combination with the FreeImage image processing library and made major improvements to its RTF export capability. SuperSoftware are thanked for contributing these changes back to the OOFILE Report Writer Open Source project.
Working under contract, Andy Dent was the principal engineer developing the QuickTime® components and distributed systems architecture used in DDD's award-winning OpticBoom™ movie presentation system. Running on Macintosh and Windows, OpticBOOM allows the user to play stereoscopic 3D movies with realtime rendering. This means they can choose types of glasses, strength of 3D effect and even turn it off, as the movie is playing.
Note as of mid-2002 DDD changed their company focus to the glasses-free hardware market and are no longer distributing OpticBoom and free internet movies. Cached OpticBoom announcements may still be available via Google.
Mercator's KIDMAP™ product was a highly successful Windows product, written in Visual BASIC® and Crystal Reports®. A.D. Software's team played a key role in the development of the Macintosh version. Roles filled on the project include most of the user-interface design, programming and mentoring the internal programming team.
Our OOFILE range of database and presentation tools was developed in conjunction
with this project, needing to match the output of Crystal Reports with a Macintosh
version. OOFRep is the first report-writer product on the Macintosh available
to c++ programmers. We also developed a graphing engine and RTF and HTML export
for the reports. The Mac and Windows versions of these tools have been retailed
internationally since early 1996 and since to a number of Unix sites. The OOFILE
database allows use of Faircom’s c-tree Plus® cross-platform ISAM engine
as well as dBase® III+ and IV files for data exchange.
In addition to developing our OOFILE range of products, significant extensions
were made to the AppMaker™ code generator to generate database applications
and make it possible for multiple programmer teams to extend the generated code.
KIDMAP is the largest product produced using AppMaker. Extensions were also
made to the PowerPlant™ application framework from MetroWerks. These extensions
are now part of the standard PowerPlant distribution.
This 4th Dimension client-server database provides includes most of the historical sites managed and catalogued by the council. It includes histories and extensive descriptions of sites, grants management and a records-management facility with bar-coding of physical files. A particular feature is the searching and reporting subsystem which allows searches and reports across the entire range of information stored. Keyword searches are used extensively to find all information relevant to a query.
The Homebuyer magazine (until the full-colour version came out
late 97, at which point they used a COTS system) illustrates the output of these
programs. The pictorial ads are entered on a Prime multi-user system and a coded
text file sent to the Mac. The Mac then automatically lays out the pages with
optimal positioning of ads, within the sorting constraints of suburb order,
including grouping ads together for the same Agent/Suburb. The pictures are
physically pasted in for production efficiency.
The classifieds section is completely entered on Macs. It is a multi-user system
with 2Mb Classics (under system 7) connected to a IIci running AppleShare 3.
The ctree Plus database engine was used with the DataPak word processing toolkit
in a Think C/TCL program. Users enter individual ads in a simplified WP environment
and pagination, including vertical justification, is automatic.
The WA Dept. of Transport required a suite of public transport modelling programs converting from MS-FORTRAN to Think Pascal. After investigation, no conversion tool was found and so the major part of the task became the writing of this tool. By the end of the project, the conversion tool was sufficiently capable that the average program conversion time was 15 minutes, including the remaining manual adjustments. The project included the writing of a complete runtime I/O library for FORTRAN formatted and unformatted I/O, in Think Pascal.
Printforce is Australia's largest Real Estate publisher and all
houses printed in their clients' publications are advertised on their www.showme.net.au
site. The site indexes were built using an AppleScript/FileMaker Pro solution
which took around 40 hours to rebuild. I rewrote this solution in c++ and improved
the output, for an average running time of around 40 minutes.
"Tender Documentation System" - Main Roads of WA
The WA Main Roads Department create over 600 minor contracts per year, as well
as several major contracts. This web-based system takes their original Word
specifications and breaks them into individual parts. New contracts are constructed
by entering a few contract details and checking boxes to select the relevant
parts. The generated RTF contract includes the contract details, merged into
the original specifications. This system was developed under Windows NT®
and deployed on Unix, using the OOFILE database.
The WA Dept. of Transport had a Pick based system requiring Freedom
100-compatible terminal emulation for the extensive set of control codes used
in screen formatting. The project involved the complete rewrite of the VT100
emulation of the freeware "NCSA Telnet" product to the Freedom 100
emulation, including creation of a custom "dim" font. Marksman™
code generators for Symantec’s Think Class Library
Marksman was a retail product (from ITMakers in California) which lets programmers
draw an interface, and generates source code. I wrote the code generators for
the object-oriented TCL which accompanies Symantec’s C++ for Macintosh
(the most popular on the Mac for years).
Complex system for entry & analysis of wide variety of data relating to client details, personal problems and government agency performance. The user-interface of this database provides code-based entry for skilled users as well as simple point-and-click selection from lists. A summarising feature makes it easy to prepare reports and view explanations of the often-sparsely entered data. A 3-level cross-tabbing report is also included to allow comparison of factors affecting employment and other problems.
Summit Homes uses the ArchiCAD design package and required a means of importing design details into their mini-based job costing system. Our system allows them to define arbitrary "factors" which either specify how to retrieve data from the design file, or an algebraic calculation to be performed upon other factors. Any factor can be specified as being exported. This gives vast flexibility and enables changes without requiring programmer involvement (the client at last count had over 500 such factors defined!)
