December 15, 2012

QViewer rebranded, got paid version


A few significant changes happened to QViewer -- viewer for QVD files which I wrote a few months ago and still continue developing.

First of all, QViewer has been re-branded as EasyQlik QViewer and got its own web-site http://easyqlik.com (which however doesn't differ much from the old one).

Second major change is that QViewer has now two versions -- free and full. Free version is limited to 10'000 rows which is still quite enough to do some data profiling. Full version is paid (license key can be purchased for $45) and unlimited. License is personal (i.e. limited to a person, not organization) and has no limitation by number of installations -- you can use QViewer on as much computers as you need. In 8 months the demo version was download almost 1'000 times so it gives me the hope that someone found it as much as useful as I do :) However, further development of QViewer in terms of features, usability and functionality will directly depend on number of licenses purchased as this will show if QViewer is really useful tool or not.

Third change is that finally I got rid of troublesome ClickOnce installer which caused lots of problems with installation and even more with uninstallation. Now QViewer comes with standard neat NSIS-based installer and actually is a portable application. It means that you don't necessarily need to run installer if you want to move QViewer to a different machine. Once it has been installed, you can simply copy qviewer.exe to other machine or add it to your portable apps collection on USB-stick. However, running installer has advantage of automated association with .qvd file extension, which can be problematic otherwise. And as previously, QViewer requires installed .NET v4.0 or above -- keep this in mind when using QViewer in portable mode.

Future development plans include adding sort functionality for listboxes and metadata tables, and design of custom data grid. The latter should significantly decrease load times as the current implementation uses standard DataGridView which is so slow that only initializing it actually takes major part of total load time.

And of course, if you have feature suggestions -- don't hesitate to give me a shout by email or in comments here.