One of the things we’re always working hard to do is to make Resolver One snappier and more responsive. And one of our most frequently-requested enhancements is to produce versions for Apple and Linux computers. These goals are actually closely related; both depend very much on the grid component we use.

Right now, the raw grid display and editing portions of Resolver One use a third party grid component. It’s a great tool, and we would recommend it highly. However, its general-purpose nature means that it can never be as snappy for us as something we have written ourselves. And, perhaps more importantly, it is very much a Windows grid component, not a .NET one — so without replacing it, we can never run on other operating systems.

So we’re writing our own replacement grid. This will make Resolver One 1.10 much faster and more usable. It will not make it cross-platform straight away — we have a few other Windows dependencies that we need to sort out for that — but it’s the first, and we think largest, step in that direction.

Naturally, there’s a lot to be done to get everything moved over, and we don’t expect to be able to release a beta until at least early May, but if you’re interested in beta-testing Resolver One 1.10 when it’s ready, and seeing how the new grid makes it a better spreadsheet, drop us a line at beta@resolversystems.com.

We’re now going through the final internal testing phase for Resolver One version 1.8. The biggest change for this release is that we’ve moved on to IronPython 2.6, which brings with it a solid boost in performance and responsiveness. We’ve also added a number of new worksheet functions, made some performance improvements of our own, and fixed a number of bugs.

If all goes well, we should have a release candidate ready to download by the end of the week.

The 1.5 version of Resolver One will be released soon, and we have already uploaded a screencast showing off its flagship feature. The screencast demonstrates the basic use of the console as well as some ways to interact with a spreadsheet.

Version 1.5 of Resolver One is now ready for beta-testing.  Our aim with this release was to help people debug their spreadsheets; the new feature that we hope will help most with this is the console.  From this new window, you can run Python commands, giving you an easy way to manipulate and view data in your spreadsheet from a command line.

In addition, we’ve added a simple jump-to-line dialog that takes account of the three user code sections, the ability to import from/export to CSVs, and many other minor enhancements.  If you’d like to beta-test these features, just let us know by email to beta.signup@resolversystems.com.

Resolver One 1.4 has one main “headline” feature – we’re moving over to IronPython 2.0.  This brings you some immediate advantages, including bugfixes to the core scripting language, new supported core libraries like urllib2, and support for Python 2.5 syntax in your user code.  We should also have a significant improvement to startup time – one of our most-frequently requested enhancements!

However, release 1.4 isn’t just about changing our underlying platform.  There will be three major new features:

• Alpha support for numpy!  Our Ironclad project has been working toward this for over a year now, and in Resolver One 1.4 the work will start to pay off.  This feature will be very much at an “early access” level, and some aspects may not work – but it should certainly be ready enough for you to try and to tell us what we need to add to make it ready for your needs.
• The first steps towards what we call “model-side scripting”.  In Resolver One 1.4, you will be able to set a cell’s formula from your button click handlers. While this is a small change in itself, it has big consequences – and should be a big help for people trying to write CRUD applications in Resolver One.
• A major upgrade to our support for statistical calculations, with 24 new statistics functions, from AVEDEV to VAPR.

It’s shaping up to be a great release!