Just going to put my thoughts down here and see what other think.
First I love how damn quickly I was able to get a 26,000 record database up and running for a team of researchers. And certainly in the 2 years since it has escalated further with enhancement and changes to what we are storing in that database.
The eventual aim is to have the database available for public viewing sharing the stories, images and memorabilia of soldiers of a partiuclar Australian military unit in 1941 (9th Division).
Now hear me out on this I started computing when the IBM PC had dual floppies and phosphor green screen. I was working with a PR1ME Mini Computer utilising Info/Basic programming language which enabled a lot of code cutting without any of the “paraphenalia” of unnamed variables etc of other products at that time.
And it was a true relational database with field in a main file holding multi-value keys to another or if another file was not required multiple values on a line whose position was matched with any further information on following lines. It made a lot of things very easy to do.
By contrast the relational model of knack I find somewhat confused but maybe that’s just me taking that bit of extra time to work it through.
But what I LIKE BUT also DON’T LIKE in Knack is the front-end presentation.
Let me explain I came from purely text based screens with no capability ot store or display graphics and migrated through to MS Access which had both and could be presented really professionally on a PC screen.
I really do miss that “graphical front-end”, the flexibility to move input fields into a particular spot and not have them flop down the page because something else was moved around them. I have spent more time trying to get “aesthetically easy on the eye” input screens that I would care to mention. The fact that certain field types interfere with the line up of fields down the page if multi colum display is quite weird and needs forethought and planning so that you have some sembelenace of order.
The addition of Rich Text has been great, enabling me to display some relevant graphics on screen to “smarten it up” but at the end of the day horrid little boxes of undetermined length (without loading the app with code everywhere) is somewhat archaic in presentation. I even did the excercise of replicating to a degree our main data screen in Access and whilst it looks great, Access has some built in weakness on the database side that cant be coped with easily.
Is it just me or do others find this also to be the case ?
Has anyone used a front end for Knack that is more modern and more easily controlled ?
Is sharing the knack data with an external product such as Access under consideration even ?
Just a lounge chat folks
