The VIEW From the Other Side

(Today’s guest blogger is Charles Prineas, the creater of The V File Viewer.)

I started writing The V File Viewer in July 1996, and after several months of beta testing, it was released in April 1997.

As soon as the first beta was released, I started getting requests for 4DOS support (users wanted V to to display and edit the 4DOS descriptions). In keeping with the high priority I gave this feature request, 4DOS support was implemented in 2003!

In May of 2011, I received an email from Rex asking me if I would be interested in having a custom version of V distributed with Take Command, replacing the LIST viewer.

I was busy implementing some major changes for V13 at the time, and my initial reaction was that I really didn’t need the extra work! However, after further consideration, I thought that it would be a good way of making V available to a larger audience.

I decided to put all the major V changes on hold and concentrate on developing a view only version of V to be included with Take Command v13. The result was VIEW – which has all the file viewing functionality of V, but will only run on systems with a Take Comand license.

An added benefit of developing VIEW was that it forced me to separate the string resources from the main V program so VIEW could be translated to other languages. Not only will you shortly see some foreign language versions of VIEW, but there will also be foreign language versions of V – something that I had wanted to do for a very long time.

V13 will be released any day now, and I will start the long process of developing the next version (V14) which will hopefully include the major changes I had intended for V13.

If you would like to see any new functionality in VIEW, now would be a good time to let me know. Given that V14 will not be released until this time next year, I will have plenty of time to implement any suggestion – as long as I give it a high enough priority!

Charles Prineas
Fileviewer.com