Congratulations...

[Marc Giao]

Hi Paul,

Congratulations on the release of FireFly 3, from what little I've seen so far... It sure was worth the wait  you did excellent work.

I like the new editor, the new look, the function and image libraries, the charts, the notes/tasks and the videos are a fantastic idea.

[Paul Squires]

Thanks Marc,

I really appreciate the kind words. It is hard to believe just how long FireFly3 was in development. I essentially re-wrote the program probably 5 times over the last couple of years. I originally went for a replica of the new Visual Studio environment (you know, with the fly out, pinnable, dockable menus, etc...). I used it for a couple of weeks - hated it. Scraped it and went back to the traditional FireFly look and feel.

I had lots of help from a great group of beta testers. I am amazed at the unselfishness that these beta testers showed me over the last year or so. They certainly moved FireFly in the right direction. Haakon Birkeland spent hours upon hours designing and re-designing the graphics for Firefly. I really like the resulting blueish theme and new icons. It all seems to fit together.

The code editor was written 100% from scratch in 100% pure PB code. It is not based on any other PB code available, not EDM32, not anything. It was one of the most labor intensive efforts for FireFly3. Actually, the base editor was relatively easy to write... it was when I added code folding that it became "complicated"    The code editor will grow and mature further over time.

Lastly, I splurged and bought a membership software package called "aMember". It is $179 and maybe it is a little over kill for managing the new site but it certainly makes protecting this forum, the downloads section, and the main membership area a lot easier for me. One of my pet peeves of FireFly2 was allowing just about anyone access to the PlanetSquires forums. When FireFly2 starting showing up on Warez sites, I knew that I was starting to provide free support to people who had pirated FireFly2. Not a good feeling. The new PlanetSquires website was built using WYSIWYG Web Builder software - what a great web design program - I highly recommend it. Very cheap but extremely powerful. Amazing.

So, here we are, with a new era of FireFly programming. I really hope that the software meets everyone's expectations. There is so much that we, as a FireFly Community, can do with FireFly. The fact that FireFly is written using FireFly makes it quite a bit easier for me to modify FireFly and add new features.