As you well know, I’ve now made available for download an early pre-release version of misvCRM. Earlier today, I received an email from someone who had downloaded a copy. The email was quite long filling two (2) pages when printed. The email contained a lot of very good suggestions on how to make misvCRM more usable and attractive to those who are looking for such an application. The sender is a software developer herself and she has developed a business management software for artists (http://www.artaffairsoftware.com).
I’m going to implement most of her suggestions before the thirty days are up since I have most of the hooks in place and it will not eat much into the remaining days.
While I am at it I would like to list some of the third-party tools that I am using, excluding my main development tool which is Delphi.
EMS SQL Manager Lite for Interbase/Firebird - is a powerful tool for InterBase/Firebird administration and development. It provides an easy-to-use graphical interface for maintaining databases and database objects, managing table data, building SQL queries, administering users and their privileges, extracting, printing, and searching metadata, etc. The lite version is free.
FlameRobin - is an open-source application that basically does what EMS SQL Manager does except with a less flashy GUI. The reason I use it is because there are times that I only need to have a quick look at the database or the existing data and using EMS SQL Manager is a bit of an overkill.
Advanced Data Generator - I came across this a couple of days ago and it is a great application for generating data for database applications. It enables you to define the type of data that needs to be generated for each field of your database tables. It is even possible to specify real-life looking data e.g. first names, last names, company names etc. If you want to load test your application using a data generator is a must. You can download the trial version.