QSA ToolWorks Public Feedback Forum

http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/index.php; An RSS Feed for an Ultimate PHP Board site en-us UPB 1.9.5 Plus Wilcox Development Solution's RSS Mod 30 Paid & waiting (Posted by timan)Hi guys, Well it has been a 9 months since we prepaid for OS X native RADE and we're still running 5.3.2. Yesterday we ordered three new Intel based Macs for the shop. It looks like I am stuck forever(?) running one old G4 just for the data base. ToolWorks web site has no calendar and no insight on future releases. They apparently have no goals they will share. A certain lack of confidence prevails. Do you have a sense for what is going to happen. Should I set the G4 for up on a box in the corner or somehow find room for a permament desk? http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=69 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=69#361 Paid & waiting (Posted by Matt)<a href="/2userservices/faqs/6/xcode_transition.html" target='_blank'>qsatoolworks.com/2userservices/faqs/6/xcode_transition.html</a> <a href="/2userservices/faqs/6/intel.html" target='_blank'>qsatoolworks.com/2userservices/faqs/6/intel.html</a> [urlhttp://qsatoolworks.com/3everythingelse/thelatestword/[/url] What more can we say? http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=69 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=69#362 Support for Outline Text Style (Posted by Charles Dyas)Outlined Text. Let it wither on the vine. It's not worth diverting any effort http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=2&t_id=16 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=2&t_id=16#363 Helix & Scripting - OS X (Posted by Robin)For years I have successfully used an applescript to perform a backup of my collection and also to run some daily tasks. I quit the collection running in the server then re-launch it in Rade and trigger various sequences using Autotype. Now I am trying to migrate to the OS X server and Autotype will not work in Classic. I can't find anything else that will replace Autotype, the GUI control built into OS X applescipt doesn't work in classic either. iKey and Quickeys have been suggested but they do not seem to work within an Applescript. So what can I do? Anyone got any suggestions? <img src='/forums/smilies/wallbash.gif'> http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=70 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=70#364 Performance of 6.0 (Posted by Robin)I am comparing a collection using the 6.0.1 server on a 2.5 mhz G5 with the same collection using the 5.3.2 server on a 1.25 mhz G4. Both are on the same network and running an identical collection. I have a G4 titanium running both 6.0.1 and 5.3.2 clients. I have set the memory on the clients to the same value and have also played with the buffer size in 6.0.1. Both clients are running on saved structures. I have tested various forms and searches and found that the performance of 6 is significantly worse in most cases but better in one area. The forms with multiple embedded subforms are about 30% faster. However, a simple listing form with no subforms takes 4.1 seconds in 5.3.2 and 8.3 seconds in 6 - more than twice the time. This is the case with most of the listing forms in my collection. So, I just bought an expensive G5 that, in itself should give me a significant performance boost, but instead find that 6 gives me one small step forward and one big step backwards. I checked out 6.0.0 as well cos I heard that it was faster but it seems no different. I have not compared the performance running on the same computer. It would have to be the G4, of course, and I stipped out all the OS X junk from that a long time ago - I can't be bothered to put it back. In any case, since 6 is slower on the G5 I think I can guess the result. Basically there is absolutely no point in me upgrading and I will keep using 5.3.2. I am very disappointed by this - I was really excited to do this upgrade - am I really the first person to do a reality check like this? Also, anyone want to buy an 'almost' unused G5? <img src='/forums/smilies/confused.gif'> http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=71 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=71#365 Performance of 6.0 (Posted by Matt)No. Your 'reality check' simply doesn't line up with the experience of everybody else. Check your buffer settings and make sure they make sense for your collection. http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=71 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=71#366 Helix & Scripting - OS X (Posted by Matt)Use Helix's do menu() command. http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=70 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=70#367 'Application Path Failed" (Posted by Matt)Fixed in HMM 1.0.1 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=12&t_id=1 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=12&t_id=1#368 Printing error -50 (Posted by Douglas McKibbin)When I try to print a document with an embedded picture field from Client (v6.0) I get an Apple error -50. This seems to happen no matter what to printer I am sending the job. When printing color documents from other apps I see no problem. Is this an issue with Client and Classic? I seem to remember printing problems with Client years back but I had been able to print documents with embedded color picture fields from Client in previous versions. http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=72 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=72#369 Printing error -50 (Posted by gmorin)Not sure where the problem lies but the solution is to go the Chooser in Classsic and create a 'classic' printer there. Then print to that 'classic' printer from within Helix. Typically if you have appletalk zones you will see the 'classic' printer in the Printer dialog listed as '<printer_name>@appletalk-zone'. This also gets around a bug I've encountered when printing multipage documents from Helix to an OS X created printer wherein some pages just randomly don't print (i.e. print 50 chekcs and 3 checks within those 50 just don't print out). Using the 'classic' printer version solves this problem. Good luck! http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=72 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=72#370 Migrating to Filemaker Pro (Posted by johnfaludi)Currently I'm the only person using our database. I've been given the deadline of June '07 to get our database working on our OSX Macs and on our Windows machines or migrate to Filemaker Pro which is compatible with both environments. I have managed to stall for a long time but now my time is up. My question is, has anybody else had to migrate to Filemaker? And is there an easy way to do it? Any ideas would be appreciated. John http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=73 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=73#371 Migrating to Filemaker Pro (Posted by dkuchta)I have not made the transition, but I have looked at doing it several time and always been sorely dissappointed. Unfortunately, its a very different set of tools, and that has a major impact on your design. Certain Helix features are just not available in FileMaker (and visa versa) so you will probably have to rethink how you approach the database altogether. If its a VERY simple database, you might be ok. But I tried it with what I thought were some pretty straightforward databases and found that I'd have to pretty much start my design over from scratch. At that point I gave up, and I keep hoping Helix will be out in OSX 'real soon now'. I've been hoping that for a couple of years. :-) I hate to be so negative, but maybe others have had different experiences they can report on? http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=73 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=73#372 Migrating to Filemaker Pro (Posted by twistsol)I have attempted a migration of other products to FileMaker uncuccessfully. To be frank, it simply isn't as robust as Helix and maintenance on complex applications becomes a nightmare. Caveat I haven't used the 8.x versions which are supposed to enhance the relational abilities of the product. In my opinion, you would be better served to move to 4th dimension or Omnis Studio. You will experience a signficantly higher learning curve, but won't be bound by the limitations of FileMaker Chr's http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=73 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=73#373 Migrating to Filemaker Pro (Posted by optixbil)I've tried Access, Omnis, 4D and I've used Filemaker for about 8 years. Filemaker is a very good program. I've sold a lot of stuff using it, all to PC users. Mostly police departments with a central server. It is not Helix, but then Helix has it's shortcomings too. Imagine a program that needed a DOS only client. Filemaker has some very real advantages such as cross platform. You can modify the database while others are using it. You can publish to the web using desktop forms, no coding. You can access a database that is hosted on the web with either a browser or a real Filemaker client or both at the same time, (100 real clients and 250 browser clients) and if you use a real Filemaker client, you can modify the database in real time, while clients are using it, from 1000 miles away. No need to shut down the server. You can have separate files (tables) like Helix or you can have multiple tables all in one file. The relationships are easy. Multi user is a breeze using peer to peer or with a server. It comes with a lot of pre-built templates that are very nice looking. I've used Helix since '84 and it's my favorite, my whole company is built around it, payables, receivables, payroll, everything, but... For a PC only database I like Alpha 5. That is real power, steeper learning curve but you can trigger events when you open a form, close a form, click into or out of a field, mouse over events, you name it. But for Macs, you've pretty much got Helix and Filemaker. You'll have to get your mind around the fact that you'll have to start over, but it's really quick to program and I find that after spending years on a program, I can think of a lot of better and easier ways to do it the second time. You've got a clean slate. Don't hesitate to contact me off list if you need help. Bill@TrackerSystems.com http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=73 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=73#374 Server 6 Processor Consumption (Posted by aersloat)We have been running Helix Server v6 for a while now but about two weeks ago we upgraded our main OS X server to Tiger on a new core 2 duo MacPro and decided to retire the little machine that helix was running on and consolidate services on one server. The collection that we are serving is about 52mb and we only ever have 4 or 5 clients connected at any given time. Performance has been fine so far-- at least I have heard no complaints. My question is about the resources that Helix consumes. Helix has one of the four cores pegged at between 98 and 100 percent. No other service on the machine comes even close even though it is serving mail, three websites using php and mysql, and afp in addition to a now contact server and a few other services. In fact I just checked and Helix was at 98.9% and the next highest process was at 7%. This isn't really impacting the server as Helix seems to stay on that one core. I am just curious as to whether this is normal. Is it related to rosetta? Memory usage seems a bit on the high side, but not outrageously so. Anyway, just curious. This is 6.0.1 (65) by the way though (64) was the same. http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=74 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=74#375 Server 6 Processor Consumption (Posted by Matt)Versions of Helix prior to 6.1 (tentative) take all free CPU time. As soon as another process requests CPU time, Helix yields, so this does not impact performance of other processes on the machine. The main downside is that it keeps the CPU humming at 100% and therefore consumes extra energy (creating more heat). The reason this happens is obsucre, but we found and fixed it during the Xcode transition. As we release new Helix products built in Xcode, the problem will dissappear. http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=74 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=74#376 Server 6 Processor Consumption (Posted by aersloat)Thanks for the response, Matt. http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=74 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=74#377 hey (Posted by Admin) http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=378 &t_id= http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=378 &t_id=# /../images/data351079596.cgi (Posted by 1) http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=&t_id= http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=&t_id=# Document Field and Pages 2.0 (Posted by histrad)I would like to insert documents written with Apple's Pages 2.0 in a Helix RADE Collection. After designing a Collection for this purpose, I tried unsuccessfully to copy the Pages document into the collection. When Copying the document, a menu appears and instead of seeing the document as with MS Word, I saw a folder containing three kinds of document. I selected one after another, but it wasn't possible to Work on the Original or on a copy. My guess is that Helix doesn't support Pages document. Is anyone ever encountered this kind of problem? My question: will Helix support Pages document in a near future? Thanks in advance. Marc Riopel Ph.D. History <img src='/forums/smilies/rolleyes.gif'> http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=75 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=75#379 Document Field and Pages 2.0 (Posted by chuckbo)This is a guess (based on how Keynote works), but I bet that your Pages document is really a container, not a single document. A container is like a folder except OS X treats all of the files in it as part of the container when you copy or move it. Since Helix is running on OS 9, it wouldn't know anything about containers -- I'm guessing that it sees the container as a folder. I'm not going to try to predict whether it'll work the way we want it to in the future. chuck http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=75 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=75#380 Unexpected error 0286 (Posted by aersloat)We had to hard restart our server for reasons unrelated to Helix Server. However, our collection has suffered some damage. Helix Utility reports 'Unexpected Error 0286' when doing either a data damage check or repair and exits. Helix Server does not open the file. We do have backups but we are probably missing some data from them. Any ideas? http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=76 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=76#381 Crashes (Posted by optixbil)Our server constantly crashes on posting. Maybe one out of five posts. Not any specific posts and not very intensive posts either. Maybe 40 records at a time. We save the server before posting but that doesn't help. Sometimes the server itself crashes and sometimes it's the clients. 3 clients and any client can crash when doing a post. Rarely does the crash create a crash report. We did not have this problem prior to 6.0 Is anyone else having a crashing problem or is it just me? Our server is an iMac with 1.5 gig of ram with 1 gig allocated to Helix. This is a 680 meg collection. If I'm the only one having a problem, then it must be me and I'll keep trying to find a problem. But if others are also having a poblem, then maybe QSA needs to take a look. The collection passes utilities every night. Thanks Bill Belanger http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=77 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=77#382 Crashes (Posted by optixbil)Server still crashing. No crash log. Where is the OSx client?<img src='/forums/smilies/frown.gif'> http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=77 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=77#383 Lock-ups (Posted by John F)The server (6.0.1 on a G-4) continues to freeze up - maybe 3 or more times a day. Never looses data and at worst, only one transaction is logged as not processed. I'm thinking it may be related to the auto save since I disabled it while doing some maintenance and forgot to restore it. This went on for a period of about a week before I discovered it, but during that time there were no freezes. As soon as auto save was enabled again, the freezes started. It's very annoying, but not damaging anything. Anyone have any thoughts?<img src='/forums/smilies/wallbash.gif'> http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=78 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=78#384 Lock-ups (Posted by optixbil)John, how big does your logfile get to be? Is it on the same drive as the database? Bill Belanger http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=78 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=78#385 Lock-ups (Posted by John F)Yes it is on the same server, but I never looked at the size. I will next freeze. Only twice so far today, it's a good day. Do you think the size might be the problem?? http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=78 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=78#386 Crashes (Posted by optixbil)Turned off personal file sharing as well as windows file sharing in system prefs. No crashes this week...javascript:SetSmiley('<img src='/forums/smilies/tongue.gif'>') Bill Belanger http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=77 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=77#387 Crashes (Posted by optixbil)Spoke too soon. Got another crash today early AM then another on posting 42 records. I did a save prior to posting and the log file said it made 6 transactions. So I guess it crashed at 36 records in the post. Still no crash log... Bill Belanger http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=77 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5&t_id=77#388 Performance (Posted by Robin)I just thought I should revisit this topic with some more posistive feedback. Helix server 6.01 server client is working really well now. The TCP/IP speeds are excellent both on a local network and over the internet. Whatever you did in the last build it worked great! Keep up the good work guys - I am really excited to see a native OSX client . . . . . . <img src='/forums/smilies/rofl.gif'> http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=3&t_id=3 http://qsatoolworks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=3&t_id=3#389