The crack development team at SAPIEN has really gone all out to make this version of PrimalScript one of the nicest looking and user friendly versions ever. PrimalScript 2007 has a number of new user interface (UI) enhancements that allow you to customize PrimalScript’s look and feel. But these enhancements go beyond mere eye-candy. Depending on how you work, some of these enhancements may make your PrimalScript experience more productive.
Customized Themes and Skins
The first thing you’ll notice when you install PrimalScript 2007 is the ability to select a visual layout, color scheme and tab style. Now you can make PrimalScript visually compatible with other applications you might run. You can make PrimalScript look like Microsoft Office 2003 or 2007, Visual Studio 97, Visual Studio .NET 2003, Visual Studio 2005 or keep the XP default. There are several color schemes and tab styles as well depending on your visual layout.
Hear are some screen shots of some of the available interfaces:
Office 2007 – Obsidian
Visual Studio 2005
SAPIEN Black
You can change settings at any time. Once you get the interface the way you want it, you can also save your settings to a file. This makes restoring your configuration, or sharing with colleagues, a snap.
Dockable Panes
PrimalScript 2007 has removed the nexus concept but not the nexus components. You still have items such as Snippets, the Resource Browser, Type Library Browser and the rest. But now everything is dockable. You can drag any window, toolbar or panel to your desktop and make it a floating item. If you have multiple monitors you can even drag them to a second monitor. This means you can have more screen real-estate for editing a script and the output pane can be floating elsewhere on your desktop or on another monitor.
Document tabs cannot be undocked but there are some nice enhancements for them as well.
Tab Groups
If you work with many open files at once, you’ll appreciate tab groups. You can create vertical or horizontal file groupings. Each file has is tabbed and you can easily drag and drop files between groups.
This feature allows you to see more of your scripts which makes it easy to copy and paste code between scripts. If you have a group of related files that you typically work with, you can save them as a file group. The next time you launch PrimalScript you can open the saved filegroup and all the scripts will open as tabbed documents.
Vista Compatible
Of course the entire application is Vista compatible, even with the full Aero experience. Now you can develop your scripts, apps and web pages in a pleasing and relaxing environment. I suppose I could as the development team to add some soft ambient music, but I’ll leave that to you.
Stay tuned for more new features in PrimalScript 2007.
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What about Vista 64-bit support?
What about mult-threading?
Right now, 64 bit doesn’t provide any additional benefit to PrimalScript. Adding 64 bit support increases the code base complexity which by itself isn’t a showstopper; there just has be to a compelling reason and right now there isn’t. This is not to say this might not be addressed again in the future, but in the near term I wouldn’t expect to see a 64 bit Vista version of PrimalScript.
As for multi-threading, as a user that should really be invisible and a non-issue. For the record, PrimalScript is multi-threaded where appropriate. It should really come down to, "does the application meet your needs and expectations?" If you have other comments, concerns or suggestions, please post in the PrimalScript customer support forums at http://www.sapien.com/forum2/.
If you don’t want comments here, then don’t approve them for posting.
If you don’t like the questions, why bother to answer them?
We welcome comments and questions. Occasionally a comment or question is posted that has potential for follow up or merits a longer discussion. In those cases we merely direct the commenter to a more appropriate forum if they wish to pursue the topic further.
In response to your question about PrimalScript features or functionality we merely intended to give you an opportunity to take this discussion to a venue where you would receive more information.
And, to be clear, whether anyone at SAPIEN "likes" a question or not isn’t really important. YOU like the question, or you wouldn’t have asked, and you deserve an answer – as best as we’re able to give. Sometimes that’s easier done in a discussion-style forum, but the reason we "bother" to answer questions is because they ARE important. You’re probably not the only one to wonder – you’re just the one brave enough to ask first – and so we feel as if we’re answering the question for everyone, as well as yourself.
Sometimes you (or others) might not "like" the answer, in which case we STILL welcome that feedback and counter-viewpoint – it’s just that’s often easier to do in a full discussion forum, where the back-and-forth conversation can be a bit more flowing.