Free the world of legacy software; that is the promise that we make. This not only means that we empower businesses to modernize their existing legacy software, but also that we guarantee that newly created software never becomes legacy, ever.
We do this by making sure that all applications developed with the Thinkwise Platform continuously stay up to date, both in terms of architecture and technology. When new technologies emerge that qualify for use in the Thinkwise Platform, we completely redevelop the existing runtime components using these technologies, by first rebuilding all available functionality to guarantee backward compatibility and subsequently expanding on it with new features and possibilities that these modern technologies provide.
The current cycle of innovation with the Universal GUI has quite some impact, as we are not only addressing the user interfaces this time, but the entire architecture of the Thinkwise Platform with the enhanced Indicium Application Tier. This not only provides better performance, security, and scalability, among others, but also guarantees that we can more easily adopt new user interface technologies in the future. For the current cycle, however, this introduces some extra complexity.
Refocusing on our promise
Our first customers went live with the Universal GUI over two-and-a-half years ago. Over the past few years, in addition to rebuilding existing functionality, we have devoted much of our resources to adding new features and UX optimizations that became possible with Indicium and Universal as well. In doing so, we have been strongly inspired by the needs of our customers and the ideas that have been reported through the community about, for example, authentication and authorization, user experience and system flows. But because of it, the development of existing features to make the Universal GUI functionally equivalent to the Windows and Web GUI has gotten less attention than we predicted.
In the coming period we will shift our focus back to getting the Universal GUI on par with the Windows GUI. (Most features of the web GUI are already available in the Universal GUI, the remaining are within the scope of the Windows GUI.)
This does not mean that we are going to implement every existing GUI feature right away, but we’ll select a subset of features that allow the majority of Windows users to switch to the Universal GUI without having to compromise on functionality. There will still be room for ad hoc matters and new features of course, but to a lesser extent.
Of course, existing Universal GUI users will also greatly benefit from the Windows GUI features, such as Excel-style filtering, drag and drop, and multi window.
Full steam ahead
We are currently in the process of re-mapping and planning the required features to make the Universal GUI functionally equivalent to the Windows GUI and will publish a forecast for completion in a couple of weeks.
Once we have taken this necessary step in the development of the Universal GUI, there will be a period of multiple years in which we will be going full steam ahead with all the great improvements and features suggested by our community, to create the ultimate Universal User Interface for the Thinkwise Platform.
So, keep reporting your great ideas to the community, because as soon as we can deploy not only our entire Universal development team but also the other front-end teams on these new features, developments will go lightning fast!