Alan:  If a business wants to create powerful and robust business applications,

they either have to have a team of programmers on staff or they just have to have the right development tools.  So today on Let’s Talk Computers, we are continuing our conversation on why more developers are turning to Alpha Five Version 9 to create their business applications.  Our guest today is Richard Rabins, Co-Chairman of Alpha Software.  Welcome back to Let’s Talk Computers, Richard. 

 Richard:  Hi, Alan.  It’s a pleasure to be back with you.

 Alan:  With today’s economy the way it is, it is plain to see that there’s a big shift away from canned applications to businesses that are building their own applications.  But, to build a reliable, powerful business application takes a lot of programmers. 

 You have the programmers that write the front-end or GUI part of the application and then you have programmers that design the back-end or the database. Then, of course, you also have to have programmers that write all the controls that are being used inside the business application. 

 Or, you can get all of this in just one package like Alpha Five Version 9, where individuals can actually write applications and they don’t have to worry about having a team of programmers.  If you have the right development tools business software should not be that difficult to create, should it?

 Richard:  I think your point is absolutely right.  The Wall Street Journal actually has a blogged article on IT and there’s a whole article on, “Why does Business Software have to be so Difficult?”

 And it’s the ease of learning and ease of use issues that are a critical issue for our industry.  It’s not a trivial problem because you can easily make software that is easy, but doesn’t have the necessary feature set to give you the capability to build what you want. 

 It’s also relatively easy to put up a very powerful language that has just a huge amount of power that only 3 people on the planet can use.  The challenge is to put out a piece of software that as you peal away the layers of the onion you realize this beast has a lot of power, but it doesn’t expose all this power to you until you are ready for it and it sort of eases you into it in a pretty smooth learning curve.  That’s sort of been our objective from day one.

 Alan:  Well, as a programmer, myself, I find good development software not only has to be powerful, but it has to be so easy to use that it almost becomes addictive in all the different things that you want to do with it.

 Richard:  It sort of reminds me of an old joke, Alan.  The word “addictive.”  Somebody once said that, “There’s only two industries where they talk about their customers as users.  One is the drug industry and the other one is the software industry.  But, it is addictive. 

I think if you look at the Alpha Forum, you see this passion amongst the users of Alpha, because it is intellectually interesting and there is some very, very cool things you can do and I think most importantly, you can start getting results quickly. 

 I was just hearing about a customer who has built a simulation of the entire Alpha site, in Alpha itself and he claims that he did it in a day.  It may not have all of the nooks and crannies, but the fact that you can do serious work and get serious results and then show those results in a timeframe that could be a day is exciting.

 Alan:  You really help us out, because you have a lot of videos and tutorials on your website that explain just about how to do anything that you want to do.

 Richard:  We have found, and I think it’s one of the wonderful things about the Web is that it is so easy for us to explain things in a visual way.  I think we all learn when we have got sight and sound. 

We started doing these tutorials a while ago and every time we put out another one, we get great feedback from customers as well as we get suggestions from customers.  As example, I mentioned earlier that we have not set up Alpha Five to make it easy to install on a VPS at any ISP.  So, we’ve got a 14-minute video that walks people through this and we’ve had very encouraging feedback on this.  We’ve sort of been very interested in explaining things. I mean, we built our first software in 1982, which certainly dates me!

Alan:  Way back then – yes, I know.

 Richard:  “Way back then,” we actually said that, “Alpha Software is special,” because it comes with spoken instructions, which was actually that we shipped it with audiocassettes that walked people through the software. 

Alan:  Oh, I remember those.

 Richard:  And people loved the spoken instructions and now with the Web, though, the fact that you can create a video and somebody can see and listen is a wonderful thing of the Web.  In addition, we’re going to actually going to start offering free training courses to people who decide to purchase Alpha Five and these aren’t just one-hour sessions. 

 These will be an intensive, six-day interactive training – because the Product meets two needs.  It’s designed for people who are new to databases; but are recognizing the value to their companies or organizations, whether it’s the value on the web or the desktop or both the web and desktop.  We also know that databases are a special breed.  They are conceptually more sophisticated and more intellectual than say a spreadsheet, which is visual and obvious. 

Our feeling is that is if we can help people through videos and even live, interactive training we end up with a really good outcome for us and we have customers who are more likely to use our Software to show off their ability and fall in love with our Software.  And it’s obviously good for the customer because they’ve got more power and flexibility at their fingertips. 

 Alan:  Well, I guess I’m from the old school.  I like books; I like to be able to take a book and get away from the computer and to get away from everything and just read the books.  And you have books on Alpha, don’t you?

 Richard:  We have a number of different authors and companies publishing books.  We have a company called Liberty, who’s now got 4 or 5 books on Alpha.  They’ve got books on building desktop applications; they’ve got books on building web applications.  They have got a book, just dedicated in XBasic; it’s got a rich language with an enormous array of functions that are available; a book that’s dedicated to functions.

 We have another company called Intellectual Business Systems and they’ve got a collection of 6 books that are sort of set up in a training type of format.   We have a book just dedicated on XBasic from a very talented user of Alpha who’s had tons of experience, Dr. Peter Wayne, and we have many other books that are currently slated for production over the coming year. 

 But, the other thing we find for which I have to give credit to the Alpha community of users, we have very active message board, with literally a huge number of posts and replies and what always impresses me is that a customer, or a new customer, will pose an interesting question and sometimes give a 1 or 2 or 3-page reply from another user with clearly a lot of thought that’s gone into their reply – sometimes even including little snippets to action scripts or custom codes to do something very specific. 

So, if people decide to come over to the “World of Alpha,” what they are actually doing is they are also joining a community. 

Alan:  And that’s the way to learn.  You can learn by watching all the videos that you have got on your Website; you can learn by the books available on Alpha Five.  You’ve have got to so much detail to help us as a developer to get started and get over that hump of looking at a new program.

 Richard:  Right.  We feel that it is important that new developers are successful with Alpha because there is a certain amount of pressure for them to show results.  In fact, there is a lot of pressure and if you’re an independent your time is your only asset so you need to be able to get up to speed quickly - whether it’s the client says to you that they want something built in Alpha or you have determined that it’s a very productive tool for building applications. 

 The time that it takes to learn a tool is non-billable time so we recognize that to the extent that we can ease that process we are helping the developer and we are helping ourselves.

 Alan:  You are constantly looking at things that need to be in any application, even the small things.  For instance, one of the things that a lot of developers leave out and end users really scream for is that when they are doing any kind of transactions, there is always a time factor that is going in the transaction.  Sitting and looking at a still

 Window just drives you nuts after awhile. 

You want to be able to see what is going on by having little status bar updates or something on the screen that says, “I am searching a record or I am doing this.”  Now, you have given us a status bar that we can work with.

 Richard: You know it’s an interesting thing and it seems like a small thing if you are processing data.  And now with Alpha Five, you can use as your back-end, you have the option of building an applications, both desktop and web against a true SQL database, such as SQL Server or MySQL or EnterpriseDB or DB2.  You can be dealing with some very significant amount of data because the heavy-duty database lifting is done by the database server. 

 And so sometimes there is nothing to put up on the screen, but there is work going on.  It’s very reassuring to have a developer put in these status bars wherever you like, just letting people know that we are working, “We are 70% through; 80% through,” vs. just an hour glass sitting there while it’s doing something.

Alan:  You know, so many times people look at that hourglass and say, “Okay, my computer has frozen again – well I know how to remedy that!”  And then you give it the three-finger salute.  While, what is really happening is that it’s just going through and organizing a bunch of records.

Richard:  It’s doing a lot of work and obviously as you know, if you do a three-finger salute at the wrong time, you can end up with some real problems.

 Alan:  I know when you are building an application for an end user to use, one of the features that they always want and never really gets included until the last run – is being able to add notes to every transaction.  Normally, you just pop up like a little edit box and it saves it as a file.  But, you actually, not only do rich text memos; now you can do HTML memo fields.

Richard:  The richness of the applications, including what you just noted, is very important and that also brings up another aspect.  You want your software to be custom; you want your software to do exactly what you want it to do.  You want to be fast and this is not obvious, necessarily, to everybody. 

 It’s important also that the software visually look attractive, because this, again, what people are spending often hours a day in front of.  And if the thing works but is unattractive and unappealing – putting a little effort to make it look better

And for example, your notes field is in  some monospace font vs a HTML with cascading style sheet support and it just looks attractive, it has some real benefits potentially.  For example, if you had a customer service person on the phone, you could lay out text nicely so that the customer service person can easily find the information or the notes that they are looking at.  So, not only is it making the system more pleasant to use, arguably it’s also making the system better. 

 Alan:  Well, now when you talk about it that it’s a HTML memo field, does this actually include like Hotlinks that I can put in there to go to web pages?

 Richard: It does.  Once you’re in this memo field, it’s very rich and you can put Hotlinks to web pages or you can put in Hotlinks to other forms or other aspects of Alpha Five. 

 Alan:  And if somebody would like to find more information about Alpha Five Platinum, where would they go?

Richard:  They would just go to the Alpha Website, http://www.alphasoftware.com.

 Alan:  Richard, we’re out of time and we will have to pick up this interesting conversation on “More Reasons why Businesses are not Turning to Alpha Five Version 9 to Create their Business Applications,” next time.

Richard:  Alan, I’ve really enjoyed being with you again and thank you for the opportunity.  Be well.