Carrier Companion News

We’ve been tinkering with the next release of Carrier Companion, and wanted to show you what’s in the pipeline.

Here’s the new look of Carrier Companion, as well as some of the AI:
 

And this will be the home page of Carrier Companion:

Notice the nifty graphics. This program will be 100% Windows Presentation Foundation. So it is best to update windows. We don’t know how this will run on systems before XP since Microsoft no longer is supporting XP.

We will soon have a preview release of Carrier Companion, this way our customers can see the look and feel of the next release. Expect to see this release in late August 2008 – Mid-September 2008.

Ok, we have looked through the various repairs the SP1 does to the .NET 3.5 framework, and are heading back into production. The new service pack does, in fact, run a lot smoother and has support for hardware acceleration. So, we may add some visual effects to the program so that the users won’t see the same old grids.

We have also ditched Xceed. Eventhough it provided some components for WPF, it didn’t provide the charts. This is a crucial part of the new generation. We are now looking into NetAdvantage. This group has out done itself with their components. We will now be able to incorporate charts and graphs into this release. The charts can also be in 3D which is nice, but may not be practical. We’ll see…

Well, in the mists of developing Carrier Companion, we ran across an update for the .NET framework we are developing on. Hopefully Windows Update will notify you of the service pack. If not, you can download it here:

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (will open in new window)

This SP addresses issues with the current .Net 3.5. We are looking into what has changed, and see if we need to modify any code. The major issues is speed and compatibility. If all goes well, we will be back in development in no time.

We are placing the finishing touches on the weather feature. This feature is similar to the initial release with an added AI. The AI will detect your routes and then the weather will group according to the routes identities. For example:

If you had 2 routes in Washing, D.C. and one route in Richmond (obviously this would probably never happen, right?), then Carrier Companion would compare those routes and only place 2 weather controls on the main page. Since NOAA has expanded the weather web service, we have too. We now include the apparent temperature for the time frame given, and the humidity percentage.

Here is a screen shot of Carrier Companion with my home town at the chosen destination:

You will see the weather icons for every other hour (this is how the local airport caches things, so that how I receive it) as well as the apparent temperature and relative humidity.

We will be working more on this after the release. For now, we fell this will do the trick.

Have a wonderful weekend, and good luck on those bulky Sunday papers!