Mac to Windows

[Michael Correll]

If I may, a quick .02 or .03 cents worth on the topic since within  
the past few months I competed a similar process in developing a  
commercial product for Pan 4 Win. that is designed to run from an  
encrypted non-duplicatable CD and is currently in use in a number of  
corporate & business environments.  (And which is doing quite well,  
by the way.  Few complaints, and even a few complements.)  So using  
Pan 4 in a Win environment is quite doable.  And will probably be  
even more so with the new release.

If you are going to develop something beyond a very simple  
distributed DB with a couple of simple procedures, then face it, you  
most likely will have to do your work in Pan 4 under Classic.  You'll  
have the Pan 4 Reference there, so there wont be any confusion about  
compatible commands and functions.  And it will make you appreciated  
even more OSX and Pan 5.

You will need a full version of Pan 4 Win to test your concoction on  
as things progress.  Depending on what you are developing, you'll  
probably want to have several PCs handy to test under Pan 4 demo  
mode.  And you will also most assuredly want to test  under Vista as  
well as XP and maybe Win98.   Keep the flash drive handy as you will  
be moving files around a lot as you test and check.

You may find (as I did) that things that seem to work flawlessly on  
Mac seem to break on PC.  It' not Pan's fault.  It's probably yours.   
It seems that Pan Mac is sometimes a bit more forgiving of some  
procedural sloppiness.  Once you tighten up your code it will work.    
Have a licensed  copy on your PC so you can test and refine there  
when necessary.   When transferring you changes from PC back to Mac,  
remember you can use Pan 5 to force open and save the PC file,

The whole process can be quite tedious and frustrating at times, if  
like I was, you're a total novice.  But it's nonetheless doable.   
Bottom line....90 % of everything any (...well....most) of us will  
ever do in Pan is based on Pan 4 and earlier.   Once you can make Pan  
4 work -- and work cross platform -- the rest will probably be easy  
when Pan 5 Win is released.   But for now...you're stuck with working  
in Classic and moving a lot of files back and forth.   Good luck with  
it.  Hang tough.   Be moderate in your use of caffeine and  
alcohol....;-)

MC>

Michael Correll
--

BTW.... On the Pan Ref Wiz....I guessing that the display of the  
various versions on the menu was initially designed to show what  
specific commands/funcitons were introduced with each version --  
rather that a display of commands/functions that are *compatible  
with* each listed version.   The latter would be much more useful.   
Maybe the Pan update genie could whip up something like that when he  
has a spare moment....????

--------------------------




On Mar 31, 2008, at 10:32 PM, Ken Doucet wrote:

> I can appreciate that 5.5 will have stuff not in windows 4 but how  
> am I to
> know what they are? Without a background in Windows 4, or a history  
> of using
> Panorama prior to 5.5 I am not clear on how to develop in a way  
> that won't
> create problems. Are Windows clients a viable option in 5.5  
> environment, or
> are the issues you can run into enough to lead to a conlusion that  
> a Mac
> based client environment is the effectively the only route? My  
> client is a
> PC based shop and I could sell them on having to have an Apple  
> server but I
> need to be clear on what the Windows client pros/cons are.
>
> Ken