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Important Announcement: GapiDraw and Upcoming Releases

PostPosted: Oct 12, 2007 @ 5:42am
by Johan
Hello all,

It's been a while since a GapiDraw representative person was visiting these forums. There are many reasons for this, and I will outline these reasons below. GapiDraw has always been a community driven product, and we will do our very best to have it back that way again.

For all you "old timers": if you have been following our release history you know that up to 2004-11 we kept adding tons of new features to each release. When we released GapiDraw 3.5 we were a team of 7 full time developers working on GapiDraw, and we provided support for Palm, Tapwave, Symbian, Windows Mobile as well as stationary PCs.

Supporting Palm, Symbian and Windows Mobile, meant that every new feature or optimization we implemented had to be tested in thorough detail on every platform supported. This proved in many cases very cumbersome due to compiler differences and memory management differences. I would say that after the release of GapiDraw 3.5 we spent maybe 90% on testing and validation, and 10% on feature development. Also, maybe 90% of this testing was on non-Windows Mobile platforms and 10% on Windows Mobile. After some of our team members left for other jobs, the rest of us had to learn platform specific details about their tools, making the figure maybe 95-99% testing and validation, and 1-5% feature development. As a result, we have since then dropped Palm support, and it is also why we are now officially dropping Symbian support. We have worked with a Nokia developer to provide them with an NGI (NGage-Inside) version of GapiDraw, and the amount of time and issues involved in that work proved clear to us that we need to focus on one platform only to stay competitive and still keep the product at a low price.

We want to have fun again developing GapiDraw! And we want to add tons of fun stuff to the platform! If any of you have used an iPhone recently - that is the direction we want to go with GapiDraw. We also have numerous software toolkits under development that we cannot disclose details about at this point that will make interface development like the iPhone easy and fun.

So. GapiDraw will as of now be a 100% stationary PC and Windows Mobile solution. Updates to current GapiDraw 3.6 and future releases will be only for the following development environments:
* Embedded Visual C++ 4.0 (PPC 2003 / PPC 2003SE / WM 5.0)
* Visual Studio .NET 2003 (PCs)
* Visual Studio .NET 2005 (PCs, PPC2003 / PPC 2003SE / WM5.0 / WM 6.0)

This is so we can cut down on the time we spend on testing/validation and increase our time on actual development. If any of you really really need PPC 2000/2002 support, please let us know in this thread (if you need PPC2002 or both PPC2000/2002).

As a side effect on this change of focus, GapiDraw will as of version 4.0 be called MobiDraw. It sounded better now that GAPI is a thing of the past, and we are focusing strongly on the Windows Mobile platform. MobiDraw 4.0 will begin public beta testing in Q4 this year. If you look at the features we added to GapiDraw 3.0 when we moved from the v2 platform, you can begin to expect some good things about MobiDraw 4.0 already. A full feature list for MobiDraw 4.0 will be up on our brand new web page due out in just a few days.

What about Symbian then?

Well. If you are using GapiDraw today and are still interested in using GapiDraw for Symbian devices - we will begin to sell complete source code licenses of GapiDraw. Details about this will be announced within a week once our flashy new web site is up. Expect pricing to be in the 3k range - for that you will receive the full source code for just about everything we have. Source code licenses will be site licenses, and will not have any royalty requirements. Using the source code you can easily adapt the current code for Symbian 8 devices to Symbian 9.

Finally, the third news is that Develant Technologies (the company behind GapiDraw) has a new ownership structure. The company is now owned by a Swedish media corporation called Duplikat. And this is very good news. With the new ownership we are now setting up a three year feature development plan for GapiDraw, and we have many features in store for you all, not just new bugfixing releases as the past few years.

As of now I will be logging daily to this forum to collect feedback and to provide information about what is going on with development. And we will being doing some real development again. And yeah, we have a GapiDraw v3 update in testing as well.

Thank you for your support.

Sincerely
Johan

PostPosted: Oct 12, 2007 @ 4:13pm
by Presto

PostPosted: Oct 13, 2007 @ 7:52am
by Staryon

PostPosted: Oct 13, 2007 @ 10:31am
by Johan

PostPosted: Oct 13, 2007 @ 1:09pm
by Staryon

PostPosted: Oct 19, 2007 @ 11:47am
by tore
Excellent news!

We use GapiDraw as a GUI toolkit (and not as a game engine) and are excited about your focusing more on helping developers build iPhone-inspired interfaces.

Currently, our biggest headache regarding GapiDraw is the fact that it is based on Gapi and therefore prevents the rendering of standard text input methods on the screen (SIP keyboard, T9 word suggestions, ...).

Internationlization is another issue. We currently switch to GDI (using GetDC/ReleaseDC) in order to use truetype fonts. This works fine except for GDI's ability to render text with different degrees of transparency. Text animation requires us to pre-render everything (using GDI) into off screen surfaces in order to get sufficient performance.

Will MobiDraw have better support for text input and internationalization than GapiDraw?

Cheers,
-Tore
PS: don't mean to sound negative, we really love GapiDraw!

PostPosted: Oct 21, 2007 @ 10:18pm
by Johan

PostPosted: Oct 22, 2007 @ 9:30am
by tore

PostPosted: Jan 6, 2008 @ 9:21pm
by Staryon
Any updates, Johan? When will we be able to try to new version?

Thanks