Clarion Community Edition - Clarion

Clearly you did not listen to any of the speeches about the future of Clarion, etc, etc?
Even less about Bruce and the future role of Capesoft and Clarion?
Try to add constructive ideas instead of detracting.

Ready to listen any time. Was not at DevCon and certainly have not seen anything elsewhere.
Nothing said about this on the ClarionLive wrapup even from Bruce himself.

Clearly you did not listen to any of the speeches about the future of Clarion, etc, etc?
Even less about Bruce and the future role of Capesoft and Clarion?

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Bruce is buying out SV? I donā€™t believe for a second that Bob Z will give it up. I suspect heā€™d bury it before letting someone else have a go.

As to adding constructive ideas, weā€™ve all been doing that for years. Bob simply isnā€™t interested in anybody elseā€™s opinion. Bruce is usually the first to state that Bob hasnā€™t got a clue.

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Hello,

Is Clarion Community Edition already available for downloading?

I tried to search, but I did not find it yet.

Kind Regards,
Jouni

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There have been no announcements from Graham or Clarionsharp.com and I havenā€™t received an email.

Hello,

Thank you for the answer.

Kind Regards,
Jouni

I have contacted Softvelocity (x2) to enquire about the launch date of the Clarion Community edition.
The first response was that a request will be sent to the Product Manager to provide an update.

The second response was that the Clarion Community Edition is not the priority at the moment but an update to C11. Once the C11 update is available the focus will shif to the community edition.

:thinking:

Disappointing - I ques the proclaimed time of late Oct / early Nov has come and gone. But I still
hope for an early X-Mas :smile:

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Well they do have a history of over-promising and under-delivering, so I guess Iā€™m not surprised. Still a shame though

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I have been looking at alternatives, and have been using Ninox, which im finding is quite good to work with. Will be looking at Oracle APEX next.

I agree 100% with you.
SV has proven over the many-many years that you canā€™t go on what they promise/say.

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Clearly they have no sense of irony. This is the blog header

Capture

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Well, they promised for October or November, but didnā€™t say what year, so they are on time ā€¦

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I donā€™t know what is happening, but Doreen in November sent me a mail, that they are testing new version, and will be released soon, but since than, no information anywhere.
https://cidc2020.com/ has some information, but nothing about community edition.

Is capesoft taking over the softvelocity?

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CapeSoft isnā€™t taking over SoftVelocity. But they are a lot more active in promoting Clarion. SV isnā€™t participating in CIDC2020 as far as I know.

The only information available is from www.cidc2019.com and the SV blog article.

FWIW, the answer I got from SV from Facebook on the status of community edition was ā€œas soon as things settle down after the AnyScreen Developer integration weā€™ll release the CEā€

And please add me also brahn

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Did this ever arrive?

If so, where can I download it?

Started using Clarion back in the DOS days, but I think the last Windows version I used was V4. Iā€™m looking at returning to programming so was wanting to take a peak to see how it has evolved.

Also, can anyone sum up the differences between the Professional Edition and Enterprise Edition these days?

No, not as far as Iā€™m aware. The last post on their FB page was in February, nothing since then.

Been waiting for ages, I have totally switched over to Ninox for my clients.

This product is dead right?

Thatā€™s something of an over-simplification, since the product is neither dead, nor alive, and indeed may not even be a product to begin with.

Despite people advocating for some sort of ā€œfree trial versionā€ for decades, I donā€™t think most of those people thought too hard about what the goals, or requirements, of such a product would be. Itā€™s not as simple as ā€œmake a buildā€ and glossing over the complexity of such a thing can be detrimental not helpful.

Let me start by my assumption of the goals of this sort of product. From SoftVelocities point of view I would expect the goal to be ā€œincrease sales of the paid productā€. Other people may have other goals, but given that SV would be releasing this, and given that Iā€™ve not heard other goals being mentioned, Iā€™m going to assume itā€™s purely commercial. Of course, just like all assumptions that may be wrong, thus my arguments of what follows from that are complete nonsense.

Given the goal above and free version must be sufficiently limited that ā€œfreeā€ users are incentivized to buy the commercial version. Which means in part that you have to offer ā€œenoughā€ but not ā€œtoo muchā€. Thatā€™s a very tricky line to tread. Offer too much and thereā€™s no incentive. Offer too little and the value proposition of the product in the first place is completely lost.

Tied to this is the problem that you do in fact have to show the value proposition. In other words itā€™s not enough to make a free version, you also need to make a pathway for someone to use that version long enough, and deeply enough, to see the potential value. In other words a free product, without associated training materials is a waste of hard disk space.

Like it or not, the quality of the commercial product will also be judged by the quality of the training material. And creating quality training material is an Enormous amount of work. Books, examples, videos, support forums and so on - it all has to come together in a structured, coherent way. So suddenly ā€œreleasing a free productā€ becomes a major new project - one which SV currently does not have the resources to do. [As evidence I introduce the tiny handful of H5 videos created as the culmination of 5 years of H5 development. No examples. No docs. Diego doing all the support in the newsgroups, and now heā€™s gone. Consequence, a handful of people bothered to try H5, and a tiny number are still using it now.]

Several bold initiatives were announced at CIDC 2019 - and itā€™s clear that AnyScreen has been getting the bulk of the resources since then. And, as a revenue earner, quite rightly so. When you have limited resources (as we all do) you ultimately have to pick and choose what to work on. C12 and Anyscreen are both major projects, enough for anyoneā€™s plate.

Itā€™s no secret that Iā€™ve been critical of the feature set of the proposed Community Edition since it was first announced. I acknowledge that itā€™s challenging to find the right value proposition for the free version, but excluding all the commonly used file drivers, and locking it from 3rd party support seemed self-defeating. Taken together I argue those restrictions would not encourage a new user to see any value in the first place, and so the transition to a commercial sale would be negligible. But frankly thatā€™s just my opinion, and clearly Iā€™m biased.

Couple those restrictions though with a lack of training material and youā€™d have something that no new-user could possible make use of.

So, to answer your question, the product is neither alive, nor dead - indeed it may never have been born, and yes may go on to never be born. Weā€™ll have to think of it as Schrodingerā€™s Clarion for now.

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