At its core, Valentina DB is a columnar database, but you can treat it much like a traditional relational database.  With its columnar roots, you’ll find your database operations, especially complex queries against databases with records numbering hundreds of thousands or more, far faster than a relational database – with some operations, it may be only twice as fast. With others, its hundreds or thousands of times faster. This is especially meaningful if you are pulling large data sets for analysis with your custom applications. Valentina DB is a long time favorite with financial service application providers.

You cannot easily run Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 at the same time, without significant and non-intuitive playing around with profiles. What are the Mozilla developers thinking? Web developers have to test their web pages with multiple browsers – who does not know this?  What makes web developers howl about every new version of Internet Explorer? Let you users decide how many installations they want to run at one time.

Firefox 3 deactivates incompatible Firefox 2 compatible plug-ins, and does not offer any sort of emulation mode. This would be a non-issue if you could run Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 on the same computer without the hoop jumping. It was only after installing Firefox 3 that I discovered it deactivated the wonderful Addthis bookmarking tool. I use this tool many times a day because it allows me to not only bookmark pages using DIGG, Google Bookmarks and other services, but also to easily link a page to my Twitter profile. Nothing Firefox 3 adds replaces this, and its more important to me than the upgrade.

Why didn’t I visit the Mozilla user other community forums first? Because this is my first disappointment with Mozilla.

As of this date, the forums are packed with unhappy upgraders looking to downgrade to Firefox 2.  If you are considering upgrading – read the firefox forums first.

For Mac OS X developers, Valentina for Director 3.5.2 offers both a Carbon and Universal Binary version, with the former – and the Windows version – supporting back to Director 8.

I sometimes get asked what the difference is between Adobe Director and Mirye Runtime Revolution. They are different in so many ways – except that they both offer cross-platform solutions for building rich media applications. Director does fall short, in that Revolution also supports Linux and Solaris. But Director has Shockwave on its side, for playback through the Shockwave browser plugin. Good thing that there is a Valentina solution for both platforms.

As a consumer machine – its wonderful. I don’t have a current Intel version, but an older G4 version that runs World of Warcraft with ease. In fact, my friend Rich Hernandez, formerly Games Developer Relations Manager at Apple and currently a part of the Xbox division at Microsoft strongly advocated this use. It is true that the Mac Mini doesn’t have incredible 3D graphics acceleration, however even our old G4 is extremely responsive and the visuals clean and crisp.

Why a Mac Mini for gaming? That’s easy – because you are effectively locked into the graphics and sound support of this little machine, it makes it much, much easier for game developers to ensure compatibility. A powerful Windows PC with a high end video card will perform better, but watch out for compatibility issues – and thats even before taking Windows Vista into account.

If you like this little machine, please take the time to sign the petition.

Quicktime 7.2 automatically disables Quicktime Pro based on previous versions of Quicktime – Quicktime 5 and Quicktime 6. If you purchased Quicktime Pro and want to continue using its functionality, then you must pay for Quicktime Pro 7.x. Quicktime Pro allows you to import and export Quicktime movies in a variety of formats. While there are plenty of utilities out there that allow more and better conversions, there is a load of convenience to doing this within Quicktime itself.

From a software sales perspective – this release is interesting because of the forced upgrade requirement. Think about how Quicktime is implemented and how well this would be received if it was implemented differently:

Forced Upgrades for Components. Quicktime has application elements such as the player application. But in the end, it is a component that adds new capabilities to the operating system. In most cases, it makes sense not to have multiple component versions at the operating system level – who needs or wants a less stable operating system?

Forced Upgrades for Applications. This is where it gets more interesting. In the 3D content business, many content developers test content within multiple versions of an application, much like a web designer has to test their creation within several web browsers to ensure their web pages show correctly. They cannot give up a previous version until the market declares backward compatibility for that version is no longer relevant.

A terrible example of Force Upgrades by Application was Intuit forcing Quickbooks customers to upgrade to a more recent version of Quickbooks, just to use the Quickbooks Merchant Service. There are no inherent differences in the interfaces to this service from Quickbooks 2004 to Quickbooks 2007, and all information is passed in a standardized way. So in effect – no value is added at all by the upgrade in regards to the merchant service, and if you are otherwise happy with Quickbooks 2004 – you just have to suck up and pay for the upgrade or lose your merchant service.

In either case – Quicktime 7.x Pro forced upgrades or Intuit 2004 upgrades – neither company would be able to pull this off unless they were highly confident that the user base would find a transition to another solution more painful than paying up. And this is the lesson to be learned for software industry professionals – unless the total benefits plus pain avoidance clearly outweigh the cost and benefits of moving to a competitive solution, you should think again about employing this strategy.