New versions of both Fireworkz Pro (now at v2.31) and Messenger Pro (now at v8.05) have been released by R-Comp in time for the London Show – and if you can’t wait until Saturday (or can’t make it to the show) they are both available from !Store right now. If you can make it to the show, they will be available to buy on CD, with the CDs also containing the Windows versions of both programs plus other material.
Fireworkz Pro 2.31
Interoperability is one focus of the update to Fireworkz Pro, the integrated spreadsheet, word processor, and database, with a revamp of the Microsoft Excel saving facility. One area where this has been improved is in the size of the files you can export, which was rather limited previously.
There was also an issue with BLANK records, that could lead to validation errors when an exported file was loaded in a modern version of Excel, and this has now been resolved. And loading .xls files now also preserves any blank padding rows/columns for compatibility.
Improvements have also been made in other areas, with the M_DETERMN() and M_INVERSE() matrix functions now being significantly faster, a better attempt at handling dates in the VALUE() function, as well as numbers with currency and thousands separator characters, and complex number handling functions have also been improved.
Users of version 2.30+ can upgrade to version 2.31 free of charge, and users of 2.2x can do so for £12.50.
Messenger Pro 8.05
A number of zero page problems have been fixed in Messenger Pro – for which R-Comp offers thanks to Dave Higton for his assistance. The company notes that the problems probably wouldn’t have caused any real issues for users, but the did crop up in debug logs for recent builds of the operating system, so it was important to have them dealt with.
Users of SD card-based machines, such as the Raspberry Pi, will see some performance issues, since this has been improved in the new version – often significantly. There have also been more general performance improvements in folder redraw and processing.
The update is free to users of version 8.xx.
