UTILITIES
PopChart, OptiMap and Builder 5.0
Corda
 “This award is an extraordinary validation of our vision and commitment to providing fast, effective solutions to displaying and communicating critical information.” —Neal Williams, President and CEO |
If you build data-intensive websites, you know how hard it is to graphically display your data. That’s why this suite of utilities has jolted the judges, who realized how much effort the Corda folks in Lindon, Utah, could save them—while producing slick-looking websites in the process. The Java-based utilities run on any platform or server, and, in a world where accessibility is increasingly important, Corda’s products automatically generate all the alternative tags required to meet Federal accessibility and 508 requirements.
PopChart takes the data from your Excel tables or SQL databases and creates images in Flash, SVG, JPEG, PDF and four other graphics formats. It gets better: The images can not only be interactive but can change in real time as the underlying data changes. OptiMap generates maps using the same image formats; the ample
selection of available maps includes congressional districts, zip codes and GPS-coordinated maps. PopChart and OptiMap let you create pop-up text that appears when you mouse over images representing different data values.
To help you create these awesome visualizations, Corda provides Builder, a graphical design tool. Builder runs on both Windows and Mac OS X using Java VM 1.3.1. These tools are the ticket to making data meaningful to your users.
—Warren Keuffel
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Visual Build Professional 5.0 If your product involves a collection of things—some Visual Studio, some SQL, some Perl, some whatever—you’ll like Visual Build Professional. Building, testing and working with source repositories is a time-consuming task, and scripting approaches such as Ant are great—until you end up spending an entire day staring at XML. Colorado Springs, Colo.–based Kinook Software’s Visual Build gives you a great GUI front end for managing your Visual Studio project builds. Both build masters and developers will appreciate the breadth of features and task-based view of the workspace. The integration with Visual Studio is seamless, and all of the relevant project information is readily available in Visual Build. Integration with other tools ranging from Make to installers should also prove helpful in applying this tool to a heterogeneous build environment. —Mik Kersten |
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Virtual PC 2004 With so many products in so many categories this year, the judging process would have required each judge to take a SETI@home-like clustering approach just to sample all the contenders. Thankfully, with Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2004, it was a snap to set up a virtual computer with whatever operating system, middleware and Jolt entrant we needed. Once created, virtual computers could be easily duplicated or even copied to another computer. The virtual computers ran comfortably fast enough, and any changes to that virtual image could be kept or discarded. In addition, Virtual PC’s ability to simulate a CD drive by using an ISO file of the CD’s contents made it easy to install software that would normally require you to burn to a CD first. —Dana Cline |
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DevPartner Studio Professional Edition 7.1 DevPartner Studio is the .NET world’s answer to any and everything that could go wrong. Some of the bugs that take such a long time to solve would be easier to identify with better tool support that is lacking in today’s IDEs. Detroit-headquartered Compuware’s DevPartner Studio addresses this by providing a suite of tools for static checking of errors, performance and memory profiling, code coverage and system testing. Well-designed, advanced tool features, such as call graph visualization, set this product apart from others in this space. What developers will appreciate most is the tight integration with the Visual Studio .NET IDE. —Mik Kersten |