Clarion 7

It is almost the middle of May, which means that in 5 and a half months since the beginning of 2007, we have seen very little Clarion 7 movement. Yes we have seen some sketchy details on C7 being released in “phases” and that at the end of March, Phase 1 was nearing completion, but that was it.

I have heard a couple of people receiving emails from Soft Velocity’s “sales department”, urging users to buy the subscription plan that will include a Clarion 7 upgrade. But don’t reply and ask for dates, because you ain’t getting any.

Another thing that is slightly upsetting (with regards to C7) is development on C6.3 is still actively happening, with the latest patch 9056 being released on the 5th of May. This only means that SV developers are NOT working on C7 when they are working on C6.3.

My estimated arrival date of Clarion 7 is nowhere near 2007. Based on the vibes coming from SV, I can’t see anything being released within the next couple of months. Which means my estimate is sometime in 2008.

So my estimated Clarion 7 release date is 12 August 2008.

Yes that’s right folks. Stop thinking 2007 is the year of Clarion 7. Rather focus your energy on the arrival date of 2009, and when it arrives on the 12 August 2008, it will have been released 4 months early!

It’s official folks, Strategy Online has released the first Clarion 7 compatible accessory, J-Spell!

Install it on Clarion 6.3 along with the J-Spell C7 binaries. Do the magic conversion for Clarion 7 and there you have the world’s first Clarion 7 supported accessory!

In other less interesting news, Soft Velocity have announced that Phase 1 of the Clarion 7 roll out is complete. Phase 2 is going to start soon, so that officially means we are currently in the middle of nowhere. Phase 2 was supposed to support the new dictionary editor, but there was no mention of that, only mention of Unicode and Clear Type fonts support. Lovely.

Well I know Gary is! Although SoftVelocity are about 8 months behind their initial release date of the 2nd quarter of 2006, it is really great news that at least something resembling Clarion 7 has been pushed outside of SV’s repository.

From the initial announcement made on Friday, SV are going to be releasing Clarion 7 in 4 phases.

Phase 1 - currently at this phase

The first release of Clarion 7 to 3rd party developers who signed up for early access. These fine folk have also signed a NDA, so don’t expect to get too much info out of them. This is an Alpha version, and includes a couple of tweaks as to make it more Vista compatible.

Phase 2 - soon to start this phase

The new dictionary editor is planned for this phase. I find this pretty strange, as you would think that the dictionary editor would be one of the quicker and easier parts of the old IDE to port. This phase will only kick in once SV are happy with the feedback from Phase 1. Update: Unicode support has been implemented, as has support for clear type fonts.

Phase 3

This phase will see the introduction of the new Data Diagrammer. I’m guessing it is somewhat similar to Data Modeler, but I’m really not sure.

Phase 4

This is the big one. The App Gen. Once this beast has been released and is part of Clarion 7, thats where we will see the true potential of the new IDE come into being. Marketers call it your competitive advantage, and thats what the App Gen is to Clarion.

Obviously during these phases, individual IDE components will also be released, tested, broken, tweaked and finally fixed. As SV says, doing it this way will make testing and fixing bugs more manageable as well as shorten the development cycle. (Whatever shorten means.)

Clarion 7 - what can we compare it to?

Gary has compared Clarion 7 to the new Land Rover Discovery 3.

The old Defender was the best there was, but it lacked the fancy gadgets that the mass market wanted (airbags, ABS, HDC, etc), so it was largely overlooked. The new Discovery 3 is as good as the Defender off-road, but has all the bells and whistles on-road, so it’s attracting a whole new (bigger) market.

Me? I’m comparing Clarion 7 and the new IDE to Web 2.0. Web 1.0 harnessed everything we knew at the time about the web. It was ugly, slow, not very usable, but it got the job done. Then came Web 2.0 - and showed everyone what the web can do (think Google maps, AJAX, Youtube, etc) and you have Clarion 7.

Have you got any analogy’s on Clarion 7? Post a comment below and I’ll add it to this post.