Quote Originally Posted by jimeve View Post
Me three, rendering,tabs sounds like a brickie having a bad day
Sorry jimeve, Terpe and Steve, techie speak The boss understands and my reply was really for him

Why would I want hundreds of tabs open at once? the most i ever have is 5 or 6 and thats just coz i forgot to close them.
Les, I am confronted on a daily basis with the need to do vast amount of research in order to develop software, I am constantly asked to write code for new devices or to make an application look less boring and none of this stuff is constant or static, new versions of software programming interfaces come out ever other day it's a real PITA sometimes

I was recently asked to write an application that

1) interfaced to any scanner in the world
2) made the scanner scan individual pages and save to jpeg
3) OCR'ed (Optical Character Recognition) the barcodes embedded in the delivery notes that were being scanned.
4) compressed the results so that we didn't eat vast amounts of disk space on the server
5) integrated with my document management system so we could retrieve the delivery notes as proof of delivery for inclusion with the invoices (as attachments) at the point in time that I generate the Invoice emails on each batch run.

One might imagine that all this should be easy nowadays, however in spite of there being standard scanning or image capture interfaces i.e TWAIN, WIA, ISIS, finding a standard library that would allow the appropriate level of control was extremely difficult, indeed after much experimentation with TWAIN and WIA code (reasonably priced) it became clear that it was not do-able reliably, TWAIN and WIA are flaky very flaky.

ISIS however is very good but all the interface code libraries available cost thousands of pounds and also require runtime end user licences which was not commercially viable for us.

The primary tool for this kind of research is Google 20, 40, 80, web pages open at a time? Easy and I still won't have concrete answers.

20 pages of MSDN class library references trying to find a half decent example to implement a crappily documented programming interface, I do that every day more than one time a day.

It is extremely frustrating as most of my time now is spent trying to understand code that is supposed to make my life easier but is so poorly documented that it actually makes it harder :(

That's why some of us need hundreds of tabs open at the same time, the answers are all over the place



Jim