Browse Tag: Windows Operating System

Roadmap for Our Windows Apps (2012-2014)

Last year we began developing applications for the Mac while still activating developing for the Windows platform. With the release of Batch It Ultra v4.0 in March 2012, we concluded the major rewrite of all our core Windows applications which began in 2008. All our applications have been tested on the latest Windows operating including the Preview version of Windows 8.

During the development of our Mac applications, we took steps to compile the applications for the Windows platform. This brought about the release of our CM series of applications which includes CM Batch Photo Processor, CM ComboTIFF, CM PDF Page Extractor, CM PDF Merge, CM Note Keeper and CM TIFF 2 PDF. Although the applications work great on the Mac environment, we are not terribly excited about their performance as these applications were develop on the Mac platform.

As such, we will be embarking on the next major phase of our development. We are working towards developing for the 64bit platform. We feel that the time is ripe for 64bit applications with many of our clients using Windows 7 and probably the new Windows 8 Operating System. We will continue to support the 32bit Windows Operating System as far as possible. The 64bit platform would allows us to address larger memory sizes which would be useful for larger image dimensions. 

The 64bit Windows Operating System such as Windows 7 and Windows 8 would continue to support 32bit applications. Currently, all our applications are 32bit applications. 

To begin this new phase, we will begin working on a brand new version of CM ComboTIFF, CM PDF Page Extractor, CM PDF Merge and CM TIFF 2 PDF for Windows. We will began development on the Windows platform to ensure optimum performance for these applications. We should expect the first roll our before the year end. 

We will be looking to begin developing 64bit version of our Imaging Applications in 2013. This will represent the next phase of rebuilding those applications from ground up and expect the release at the middle of 2014.

A Note on Windows 8

Microsoft is currently working on the next major upgrade to the Windows Operating System, currently called Windows 8. This comes with a radical redesign to support not only PC but also Windows Phone and Tablets.

Before last week, there were several speculations that Microsoft would be dropping Win32 apps in support of Metro UI based HTML5 applications. However, that does not seems to be the case when Microsoft revealed more information about Windows 8 and provided a Developer Build version of Windows 8 for testing. This build is far from release and is probably at least 6 months to a year before it is prime for mass release.

There are probably many comments about Windows 8 new interface but that is not the topic of this post. We were able to put Windows 8 and our Windows applications to a test and we are happy to announce that they work as they do in Windows 7. Nothing basically changed as far as our applications experience goes. So in short, your investment is safe.

However with that said, although Windows 8 supports the upcoming Windows Phone and Tablets, our applications would not run on those platform. These devices are not based on the standard Intel/AMD CPU but rather on the ARM Processor which is radically different. Currently, only Metro Applications would run on those devices. The ARM Processors are nowhere as powerful as the current Intel/AMD CPU and their designs would not be practical for resource-hungry applications such as image processing. We may consider porting over some less intensive applications in the future but for the time being, we will wait for more information from Microsoft as anything can change on Windows 8.