Clarion ProSeries Installers and Distribution: What Would You Like to See?

Hi Folks,

We are in the process of redesigning the Clarion ProSeries website, web services, sales and distribution systems, and we thought this would be a good opportunity to ask the Clarion community what you would like to see.

In particular, we would like to hear what you like or dislike about the way Clarion third-party products are purchased, downloaded, installed, updated and maintained today and how you think the process ought to work.

Our current plan is to continue following the established Clarion third-party installation conventions that have been around for decades. They have served the community pretty well, and compatibility matters to us. At the same time, things change, and there is no point in rebuilding our systems without asking whether some of those old assumptions should change too.

We are also looking at simplifying other parts of the process, including automatic delivery after purchase and replacing some of the older registration/setup mechanisms with a much simpler system.

So this is your chance to tell us what you would like.

What makes installing a Clarion add-on easy?

What drives you crazy?

How would you prefer downloads, passwords/licensing, updates and reinstallations to work?

Are there things Clarion third-party vendors traditionally do that you absolutely do not want us to change?

And is there something you’ve always wished vendors would do differently?

One important point: we are not planning to abandon developers using older versions of Clarion. Many of our templates continue to work perfectly well with Clarion versions going all the way back to C5.5, and we intend to continue making those versions available even though our actively supported Clarion versions are newer.

We have our own ideas about where we want to take this, but before we lock things down we’d genuinely like to hear yours.

Thanks for taking the time to speak up.

Charles

www.clarionproseries.com

Wondering if you plan on any updates to ImageEx - I thought a v6 with major changes was pending
https://www.clarionproseries.com/html/imageex.html

Yes, there will be updates to pretty much everything.

This includes new documentation in most cases and new installers all around.

We also have several new very useful templates for Clarion that we are about to release.

That is one reason for the complete overhaul of our systems.

HI Charles,
several years back, Bruce and his team were working maybe with Arnold? and putting together a method to save passwords, etc. and then be able to give it all the updates and it would run automagically… not sure what happened to it? But it is a chore digging out passwords to update several products at a time. Would like to see something like this.
Ron

Hi Ron,

Thanks for the reminder about that effort.

We’ll have to look into it.

We’re definitely looking to lower the friction for developers.

Charles

Ron,

The work you are thinking about was @John_Hickey work. I believe it’s not available anymore.

Mark

Hi Mark,

That’s what I was thinking. Thanks for jogging my memory.

I still think there are some good ideas there so we will explore the concept again.

Charles