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Now that spring has come, I love to see all of the new applications and technologies that are sprouting up. Here are some interesting tools that could help make your programs bloom!

Animation Toolkit Upgraded

      The Motion Factory recently announced the availability of their Motivate 2.0 Developer�s Toolkit, a comprehensive, real-time animation and behavior programming toolkit designed to decrease development time and enhance character realism. Motivate�s real-time animation engines and scripting language allow developers to create intelligent, interactive, real-time 3D characters and environments.
      Motivate�s core architecture has been redesigned, making it extensible, modular, portable, and compact. In addition, the new version adds real-time articulated body dynamic simulation and expanded cross-platform and Internet support.
      An extensible development platform, the Motivate system includes development tools, a software development kit, server technology, and runtime engines for several platforms. Developers can extend and customize Motivate through a Motivate SDK that has been both enhanced and simplified, incorporating plug-in editors and assets into the Motivate Toolkit. New drag and drop capabilities and asset-sharing functions further simplify the content creation process.
      Motivate 2.0�s new, modular architecture will enable developers to select, replace, or omit parts of the development system to suit their specific needs, and use individual technology components of the system in isolation if desired. Available Motivate 2.0 modules provide collision detection with poly to poly, bounded sphere to poly, ray casting, real-time inverse kinematics with motion blending and motion warping, path planning and collision avoidance, real-time fully articulated body dynamic simulation, and a behavioral scripting tool based on hierarchical finite state machine abstraction with embedded JScript-like scripting language.
      Each Motivate runtime engine is available for a variety of deployment platforms, including Win32®, PlayStation 2, Sega Dreamcast, and Apple Macintosh.

The Motion Factory
39300 Civic Center Drive, Suite 240
Fremont, CA 94538
510-505-5151
https://www.motion-factory.com

Create, Edit, and Deploy Windows Scripts

      In addition to the 16 languages that PrimalSCRIPT 2.0 supports, other attributes include its ability to natively edit the latest version of active scripting languages including VBScript, JScript®, and Windows Script Components (COM objects).
      New PrimalSCRIPT 2.0 features include: Project View for managing WSH 2.0 files easily; Recycle Bin for deleted text; auto code completion and parameter list hints for JScript and VBScript; persistent undo information for files on NTFS partitions; WSH Wizards; and COM extensibility.

SAPIEN Technologies Inc.
3212 Jefferson Street, # 288
Napa, CA 94558
707-252-8700, 1-888-252-9368
https://www.sapien.com

Set Up a Store Online

      Bluestone Software Inc. recently announced the availability of the Total-e-Business product suite, a standards-based, e-business solution designed to provide a high-performance platform to support mission-critical applications.
      Bluestone�s Sapphire/Web Application Server infrastructure provides the development, deployment, and management capabilities for e-business operations.
      Bluestone XML Suite Integration Server ties together data sources and applications to unite disparate business systems within the company, as well as with third-party partners, suppliers, and vendors. This creates an engine for sharing data and documents for e-commerce, EDI, or supply chain communications.
      Business professionals and other nonprogrammers can create, collect, organize, and administer content that will be published dynamically based on user profiles. Total-e-Business ensures that dynamically published Web content is analyzed and targeted to the needs of each Web site user, and tailored to the unique delivery mechanism they require, whether it be through a connected browser or wireless device. The suite also enables companies to conduct Web-based commercial transactions and set up all the necessary elements for an e-commerce storefront, including catalog, shopping cart, credit card processing, shipping, taxation, and others.
      Total-e-Business includes a complete online store template called sonic.com. Modeled on an online music CD shop, the sonic.com template includes reusable Java-language components, a database schema, and JSPs, all of which are provided in source code format so customers can customize the store to their own specific needs. Additionally, sonic.com includes a personalized home page template, mysonic.com, giving Total-e-Business customers an out-of-the-box solution for creating customized home pages for their own customers.

Bluestone Software Inc.
1000 Briggs Road
Mount Laurel, NJ 08054-4101
888-Blueston, 856-727-4600
https://www.bluestone.com

Add Data Analysis to Your Application

      Requiring just a few lines of code to create dynamic multidimensional views to group, search, sort, filter, subtotal, and pivot data, VSFlexGrid Pro lets developers add data analysis and decision support to their applications. An alternative to using a Tree control, VSFlexGrid Pro may be used as an outliner for displaying data hierarchically, displaying nodes that can be collapsed or expanded to show branches containing additional data.
      Developers can choose among three different types of data binding, and can choose from an ADO/OLE DB data-binding version for compatibility with the latest database standards, a DAO version for compatibility with legacy systems, and the new light version that reduces footprint size and eliminates the need to distribute ADO DLLs in applications that don�t require database support. Unicode support is also included. Because it is 100 percent backward compatible with the version of MSFlexGrid included in Visual Basic®, developers can upgrade and enhance legacy applications.
      New with version 7.0 are the FrozenRows and FrozenCols properties that allow users to freeze rows and columns on the grid so that they remain visible as the user scrolls the control. The appearance of the frozen cells is customizable. Other new features include wallpaper control, print controls, custom data sources, translated image lists, and column reference by key.

VideoSoft
5900-T Hollis Street
Emeryville, CA 94608
888-228-4839, 510-595-2400
https://www.videosoft.com

E-Business Development Platform

      West Wind Technologies has released West Wind Web Connection 3.0, an enterprise Web development tool for database developers who use Visual Studio® and Visual FoxPro®. Web Connection is a complete Web application framework for developing and delivering scalable e-business solutions. It works in tandem with the Windows DNA framework for building browser, thin client and fat client Web and distributed applications.
      The new Web Connection Management Console handles project setup and server configuration through wizards. The searchable online Help system provides topics and examples that illustrate all aspects of Web Connection�s development environment, including detailed Getting Started and Step by Step guides and a full class reference of the object-oriented Web Connection framework. A demo application combines samples that illustrate many of the basic features, including a guest book, an order entry system, rotating ad banners, an automated e-mail routine, and a distributed client/server system built around XML messaging.
      The Message Board system that is included as a sample application is suited for customer service and support sites. It demonstrates an HTTP client/server, Web-driven distributed application that can be tailored into a full-blown customer relationship management (CRM) system.
      Web Connection 3.0 also focuses heavily on XML technologies, providing both HTTP XML services and client-side tools to convert complex data to and from XML. Data conversions from SQL Server and Visual FoxPro cursors, ADO recordsets, and even complex hierarchical objects into and from XML make it possible to build distributed applications using XML for messaging.
      Web Connection�s object-oriented architecture is open and comes with fully commented source code to learn from and extend the functionality of the base framework. The object-oriented nature of the framework makes it possible to add new behaviors without touching original code.

West Wind Technologies
32 Kaiea Place
Paia, HI 96779
808-579-8342
https://www.west-wind.com

Enterprise-wide Web Site Testing

      Coordinating Web site maintenance among many Web developers, QA testers, and content providers makes managing enterprise Web sites more difficult than ever before. Linkbot Enterprise�s quantitative reports allow management to work with distributed development groups and benchmark development progress. Linkbot Enterprise can provide customized error reports that can be tailored to meet the needs of specific individuals or groups, providing development teams, content generators, and stakeholders with the information showing the quality status of the site areas that concern them.
      Key features of the upgrade include increased speed and performance, support for forms, support for flash files, anchor reports, unlimited scan file size, and reports generated in ASP or HTML format.
      Watchfire also recently started shipping Macrobot 1.0, which automates the process of manual testing. Because Macrobot can record any number of test activities and automatically generates test scripts, Web sites can be retested by running one or more test scripts and data iterations, reducing the time, cost, and resources required to perform testing.

Watchfire
135 Michael Cowpland Drive
Suite 400
Kanata, Ontario Canada K2M 2E9
613-599-3888
https://www.watchfire.com

Medical Imaging: 3Dlabs Partners with Vital Images

      3Dlabs Inc. announced that the Oxygen GVX1 workstation graphics accelerator has been selected as the preferred graphics board for Vitrea 2, a Windows NT®-compatible version of software for 2D/3D visualization and analysis of medical image data from Vital Images Inc. Vitrea 2 is Vital Images� first 3D-volume visualization software product available for Windows NT, and has been developed for the Windows platform with the support and assistance of 3Dlabs.
      Vitrea 2 is Vital Images� medical visualization and analysis software for surgical planning and noninvasive diagnostic evaluation of computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging data. It boasts a significant performance increase, including 3D volume rendering up to 4 times faster than its predecessors. Proprietary code takes advantage of the new SSE instruction set of the latest Intel Pentium III processors. Vital Images markets its products to healthcare providers and to manufacturers of diagnostic imaging equipment.

Vital Images Inc.
3300 Fernbrook Avenue North
Suite 200
Plymouth, MN 55447
612-915-8000
https://www.vitalimages.com