FloPrompter Patch for Vista PCs
Let me first say: I love how easy Microsoft makes it to write and publish software for Windows PCs!
The programming tools are great and there is a lively community of companies making innovative (and some not so innovative) components that you can easily plug into your own software. For example, I use third party components in my software teleprompter program, FloPrompter, to support the robust word processing, spell checking, and thesaurus functionality.
Unfortunately, Microsoft has really screwed up some of the security foundations for Vista which makes life really difficult for little companies like FloSpace. Almost immediately after publishing FloSpace FloPrompter version 3.0, we started getting reports from current and prospective customers that the product would crash on Windows Vista compuers. It works great on Windows XP computers, however. What the heck??
The source of the problem was apparent immediately: Vista doesn’t like the code we use that provides the mirrored text functionality. However, it took about a month to figure out an acceptable solution. The bad news is that there’s no silver bullet to fix this problem. The moderately good news is that I finally figured out how to write a “patch” that, when run on a Vista PC, will fix the problem.
It’s only a “moderately good” solution because ideally, customers shouldn’t have to jump through any hoops at all, like running a second patch program. You should be able to just run the installer once and have it work on all Windows computers automatically.
I posted an entry on the FloSpace blog detailing the problem and new patcher solution. Check it out:
