Forums have been created for the members of both networks.

After releasing Morfik 3.0 and a couple of hotfixes/patches for it, Altium seemed to let the product go dormant.  Not much was heard out their offices about Morfik since then.

This seems to have started to change about a month ago.  Altium released updates to a couple of Morfik packages, then.  These were the first updates to anything that was Morfik related in about eight months.  Just a few days ago, another updated package was released.

It seems to me that Morfik, the product, is stirring again and that we might start to see package updates coming out more frequently and eventually get a new update to the toolset itself.

I guess it was to be expected that merging the Morfik development team into Altium and moving to China in quick succession would cause some disruption, but it has really been a while since we had any interesting news.   I hope this will change soon and we’ll get to see lots of interesting stuff coming out of Altium’s R&D group.

Now that I’m a bit better, I can come out and say it:  I love it!

Morfik has always been built on top of a great technology base, and has grown considerably in sophistication and capabilities with each subsequent release.  The product has attracted a number of software developers and ISVs which see the clear advantages of having a single tool with which to do all their Web development work and that creates redistributable binaries.

All that said, the fact that there are so many bits of free software available on the ‘net makes a lot of people shy away from even looking at commercial tools.  With Morfik being now effectively free, I expect we’ll see a lot more new people and companies checking out the tool and eventually joining the community.

Morfik has been rolling out quite a number of additional packages for the tool, which nicely provide ready made functionality, but which are not a requirement for the creation of great apps.  These packages help developers save a lot of development effort in creating great looking applications or implementing frequently used services such as user authentication controls.

The cost that has been set for participating in the support program should not represent a problem for just about anyone that has decided to use Morfik professionally. This program provides a nice way to get access to libraries which provide sophisticated, ready-to-use, functionality for developers to incorporate into their applications.

This certainly seems like a good move by Altium and one which should help bring a lot more attention to Morfik.

I don’t believe there was much doubt that the acquisition would come through, but it is good to know that the formalities are out of the way.

Altium has maintained that Morfik 3 should be released this month which is great news as it makes its new features the current form of the technology and allows everyone who may be waiting for the version 3 to leave beta status to fully embrace it.

The announcement of Morfik’s acquisition by Altium is reason enough to bring me out of the woodwork and comment a bit.   The news has been spreading around the IT news sites quite rapidly.

I’ve seen all kinds of comments on the Morfik forum, with both positive and negative outlooks on the acquisition.  Both are to be expected as developers tend to feel very strongly about their chosen tools and programming languages, but I believe the general outlook in this case should be quite positive for Morfik users.

Altium is a software development company that shares a lot in common with Morfik and is probably one of Morfik’s oldest partners/customers.   Just this bit should be enough to ensure the more pessimistic that Altium will be using Morfik in its own development.

Another important aspect that can be glimpsed from the news that has already been published is the fact that Aram, Morfik’s CEO will become the person responsible for Altium’s research and development.  Here is a quote from ComputerWorld Australia. I’ve pasted in the most relevant bit.

Morfik’s CEO, Aram Mirkazemi, will join Altium’s executive team as chief of engineering and will be responsible for helping define research and development strategy and directing product development.

Though, I haven’t had any information about this deal being in the works other than what I’ve read in the news, I happen to know Aram personally and I really do not believe that he would remotely contemplate the idea of merging the company if there was any intention of doing anything but strengthen the Morfik product.

Aram is a very intelligent person that is as committed to a vision of the future of the Web as any I’ve met in the past and I am confident that he is making this move based on that move.  If he was just interested in caching in on his investment in Morfik, as he himself put in a post in the Morfik forum…

I will respond to specific concerns tomorrow but I will address the comment about Morfik selling out. If our aim was to sell out would we have not chosen a company with a greater buying power?

There has been no shortage of companies interested in investing or outright buying out Morfik over the years, so I guess he really could have made that choice.

I’m looking forward to more news about the acquisition, as I’m looking forward to more news about the next Morfik 3 beta.  There should be more interesting times coming ahead for Morfik developers.

This is a great move for the future, not only because it might seem to open new markets for Morfik developers to explore but because of the change in computer usage patterns that is to come.  If you have had the opportunity to use an iPad for a few days, you might know what I am talking about.

As has been widely commented, many iPad users are changing the their computing habits and using more and more the device in activities previously done on regular desktop or notebook computers.  These users do more of their browsing on the iPad, because of its convenience or simply because it is initiated from an iPad application such as a Twitter or email client.  Whatever the reason, these users are already numbered in the millions as by the end of the last quarter Apple had already sold 3.27 million iPads and can’t seem to produce them in the quantity that customers are buying.

Analysts predictions are pointing to 10 million iPads sold this year with possibly as many as 25 million units sold next year.  While 35 million users might not seem like that many when compared to the overall number of Web users, believe me these are not users you want to leave out of your prospective market.  These creators, early-adopters, company executives, etc.

Having been bitten by the iPad bug, I know that there are many activities I would rather do on the iPad than in a regular computer.   Web browsing is certainly one of these.

In fact, access by iPad users has recently come so much to my attention that it took away some of the impact of the recent release of the Fusion Charts by Morfik. The charts are based on Flash controls which are is not supported on the iPad or iPhone.

One of Morfik’s biggest strengths has always been the fact that the application’s built with it don’t require the presence of plug-ins on the users’ computers. It is exactly this strength that now becomes an even more important selling point for the tool.  In general an application built with Morfik will work unaltered in both the iPhone and the iPad.

The only situations in which Morfik has made some use of Flash was with the FileUploader control and now with Fusion Charts.  There is a native alternative to the Flash FileUploader which is already supported in Morfik and I feel confident that in the future Morfik will provide an HTML5 based charting alternative to the Fusion Charts package.

Regardless of what new packages might be available in the future, Morfik’s current goal of supporting iOS devices is a great development for its users.

It is by no means a small event, even though its attendance is mainly restricted to Brazilians, the number of people at the event is generally in the range of 550 to 700.  Considering that Piracicaba is not a large metropolis, most attendees have to travel great distances to reach the location of the event, which doesn’t seem to discourage many.

In this year’s event I will be presenting a session on the creation of Web applications using Morfik 3 and Firebird.  This year I plan to go through all the steps involved in creating a functioning application so that attendees can get a good idea of what is involved in using Morfik 3 to create rich web applications that interact with Firebird databases.

If you are a Brazilian Morfik user and can make the trip, join us in discussing Firebird techniques, usage scenarios and the new features of the next release which  is now in Release Candidate status.

Almost two years ago I created Morfik Watch to write about everything remotely related to Morfik.  Almost at the same time I created some communities for Morfik users, using the free services of Ning.  I was never really happy with Blogger, the publishing platform on Which Morfik Watch was based or Ning.

This new version of Morfik Watch will attempt to unify the blog and the communities in a single website.  I am still looking into importing all the user accounts from the Ning communities and I hope to get that working.  This new version of Morfik Watch is based on WordPress 3.0 and the plug-in for importing Ning accounts hasn’t been verified for this version, which was just released a few days ago.

Hopefully the necessary plug-in will be verified soon and I’ll move across everyone’s account.

Due to some conceptual differences between the old and new blogging platforms I will need to put some more effort in organizing the new features I plan to have on Morfik Watch and you should notice that the structure and navigation will be in flux for some time.

Thanks for reading Morfik Watch!

This is really useful in getting started with a new project as you will be able to reuse layouts and parts of your application design that you might have already created in a previous project and saved into a template.  It is even more useful is that now that you can create pages that are specific to the iPhone and for general computers withing the same application and have the Morfik Framework automatically serve out the correct ones.  The selection is done automatically based on the device that is being used to access the application.

In adding explicit support for mobile applications into the its development environment and framework Morfik went all the way in and added support for previewing applications as they will look in the iPhone and on the iPad.  The Morfik debug browser now has a small button on the far right of its toolbar that allows the developer to choose from a list of devices and screen orientations.

The following picture shows the BookCollector sample application loaded into the iPhone preview.  The iPhone “version” of the application will contain only the pages you specify through links from the iPhone start page.  The same is true for iPad versions of your applications, though you can choose to have more than one type of device using the same pages.

The next picture shows the same application in preview mode, simulating its execution in an iPad in portrait display orientation.

At this time, Morfik supports Apple’s line up of mobile products: iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, though applications should work on other mobile devices that a fully functional browser.  This generally means that applications should function okay on Android devices, as Google’s browser implementation is based on WebKit, just as mobile Safari.  There can be no guarantee that the applications will look good on all Android devices as they all have different screen sizes and resolutions.

Morfik 3 also introduce a pair of new controls: Menu Bar and Repeater.  I’ll take a closer look at these controls and other Morfik 3 features in other follow up posts.