Unix Timestamp

[Fairlight]

On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 07:01:23PM +0000, Richard Kreiss thus spoke:
> Mark,
>
> This has been an ongoing issue with those who have owned filePro.  They
> will program what they need internally for their client base first and
> now for anyone who will pay for a function to be added and lastly, those
> items which we developers have wished for years.

Which is fine...if they're not aiming to resell the product.  If it was
strictly in-house, that's one thing.  If it's in-house -and- they're
selling it, they really should listen more to their customers.

> Years ago I went to a software conference with my wife, held by the
> company whose hospital management system her hospital was using.
> One interesting thing they did was to poll the user base for which
> modifications/additions would be added to the next release.  The users
> actually got to vote on what would be added from the list of all the
> requests.  A revolutionary idea, add the functions that the greatest
> number of users need not just what the company's management thought they
> might need.

Image-Line just polled us in the forums on which of six contrasts work best
for us for their upcoming GUI redesign.  They're taking it to entirely
vector-based graphics for 4k+ displays, and they needed to settle on a
contrast between background and foreground colours.  They were kind enough
to offer us a chance to vote on it.

> I have a feeling that the spell checker was something fpTech needed and
> went along with the word-wrap function to allow filepro to act like a
> mini-word processor.

I'm aware of why.  I disagree with the general philosophy I've heard behind
the decision.

> Then again, doing so would take the "fun" out of programming a system
> call to get this information. :) Just consider all those who replied with
> a solution.

There are always "fun" things to code middleware for.  Getting something as
basic as the epoch timestamp should NOT be one of them.

mark->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis.