README.1ST

This month I'd like to share important news on two topics: the Winner of our "Index Viewer Shootout" and some impressions of the International FoxPro Developer's Conference, held in San Diego in January.

Index Viewer Shootout
 In our September 1994 issue, I mentioned that we were bringing back the FoxTalk Companion Disk Index. This index, to he updated monthly, is a table that cross references all authors and articles that have appeared in FoxTalk since it began. I invited readers to submit entries in an "Index Viewer Shootout" and provided the specs for an index viewer application that we'd include on the Companion Disk.

We had many excellent entries, and we'd like to thank everyone who took the time to prepare one. By the time the entries were in, the Visual FoxPro beta and the holidays made the task of poring, over all the entries a little slow, but the deliberations are finished, and the fastest gun is ... Steve Zimmelman of ByteSize Software in Visalia, California. Many of you will remember Steve as the author of the popular FoxList() function that he discussed in our October 1994 issue. Steve has Contributed many other tips and articles to FoxTalk as well.

Steve's entry narrowly nosed out two other top contenders, making the final judging difficult. In the end, Steve's exceptionally clean, easy-to-maintain code won us over. We plan to enhance and port this application in the future, making maintainability an important consideration. Other things that impressed us about Steve's entry: both the DOS and Windows versions worked the first time, something that couldn't be said about several entries; his unique "next issue/next article" buttons showed creativity; and the overall design was simple and effective.

Two other contenders deserve honorable mention; Nick Drochak, who lives and works in Tokyo, Japan, rushed in a last-minute entry that came close to winning; in fact his entry was the top pick of one of our judges, who raved about its elegant, easy-to-use interface. Doug Hennig of Stonefield Systems Group, Regina, Canada, won high marks for completeness. This entry included print, reindex, browse, and set Order options. He added a clever touch: the browse will use jKey for incremental searching if it's found on the user's system, yet didn't require it--one of the requirements of our specification was that the application had to be 100-percent FoxPro code.

We've hired Steve to make minor enhancements to his winning application. We should be able to distribute it soon, Congratulations, Steve!