September 14, 2014

Major redesign of QViewer

It's been a while since I posted last time and now I've several posts and announcements waiting to be published.

Today's post is about major QViewer redesign and update which has been due for a long time. I wrote first version of QViewer 2 years ago mainly for myself, although it was interesting to see if it can be useful for other QlikView developers. I turned out -- it can, and in the last 2 years it was downloaded more than 10'000 times (7'500 downloads of 64-bit version and 2'500 downloads of 32-bit version) with average number of downloads steadily going up.

At the same time the utility remained to great extent what it was initially -- a custom-made "home-grown" software written during afterhours and in spare time, and it had good potential for optimization.



Today, I'm releasing deeply updated and redesigned QViewer version 2.0 which is finally made comme il faut, i.e. -- as it should be. If you used QViewer previously you will notice new look and feel of the new version, however the majority of changes are under the hood. During the redesign the main focus was on performance and memory consumption that would allow using QViewer with large QVD files (up to 2GBs and more) comfortably. As the result, memory consumption was reduced in 5-7 times, and load speed has reduced in 5-10 times. For instance, load time for a sample 200MB file which I'm using for internal testing, has decreased from 17 seconds to just 1 second. Even more than that -- now load time depends only on hard drive speed, so if you have SSD -- you will enjoy even faster opening.

Two other changes -- more responsive user interface better suited for larger displays, and replacement of Query (simple aggregation feature) with integration with another tool which will be released soon. Also the free version now allows twice more rows -- 100'000.

Your existing license keys will keep working with version 2.0 so no replacement needed.

Don't hesitate to try out new QViewer and let me know what you think about the changes.