January 2007 Archives

The wireless iPod I described here, back in 2005, is finally here. I want one!

Just imagine how much better it would be — with Address Book integration and all — if Apple had made it. Good enough to turn many people’s phones into nothing more than a “Bluetooth GSM module for iPod,” I bet.

BaseTen DP2 is out. The second developer preview incorporates a number of bug fixes, along with some functional changes to the way views (as opposed to physical tables) and relationships are handled.

When creating real world multi-user apps with a two-tier architecture (only the database server and the individual clients), views are often invaluable. That’s why we want to make their use as seamless as possible in BaseTen.

In DP2, the BaseTen Assistant supports setting the primary key columns of a view for the purposes of generating the database object id — this no longer needs to be done using -[BXEntityDescription setPrimaryKey:]. BaseTen DP2 can also automatically determine the physical tables a view is based on, so providing this information with -[BXEntityDescription viewIsBasedOnTablesInItsSchema:] or -[BXEntityDescription viewIsBasedOnEntities:] is no longer mandatory. Both of those calls can still be made in cases where, for example, the view depends on tables via an indirection such as a PL/pgSQL procedure.

If you want to have a relationship point from a view to another view instead of the physical table the foreign key constraint refers to, you still have to use -[BXEntityDescription setTargetView:forRelationshipNamed:]. We hope to have a nicer way of accomplishing this in a future release.

The iPhone has the same 320x480 screen resolution as the Newton had 10 years ago. The first 20 years were only the beginning…

I’d like to thank you, our customers, for making December a great month for Knox — we broke all of our previous sales records. I’m also happy to say that we now have two programmers working full time on new Knox features. There’s a lot of great stuff in the pipeline, and the whole team is working hard to bring you the goods as soon as possible. Stay tuned.

We extended the deadline for the BaseTen competition from January 31st to February 28th. I solicited feedback on this change last week, and didn’t receive objections (apart from one comment about the old deadline being just fine). So, now there’s that much more time to make your entry really shine!