The best place for information, problem solving, and general chat with
dBASE developers is in the newsgroups listed above. There are regular
posters, occasional posters, and many more who lurk, reading and observing.
One thing is sure, ... everybody is learning. If you don't fit at least
one of these categories, then you are missing out on a very valuable resource.
Have you ever wondered where all the dBASE developers who post in these groups come from ?
Although this is only a sample snapshot of statistics, taken from the last 100 hits on this site on 19th August 2005, it probably goes some way to show where the developers who are reasonably active in the newsgroups live.
If you are interested in statistics on which operating systems, browsers and screen resolutions are in use, then read on. This could be of use when designing applications, although perhaps more representative of developers than users.
100
Hits from around the world
Outside of
the USA and Europe, it is interesting to see Fiji and the Philippines,
as well as New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Brazil represented.
A
closer look at Europe
More countries
appear here than might have been anticipated, including, in no particular
order, Finland, Romania, Poland, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, England,
Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, and guess what .... somebody in Scotland
!
A
Closer look at the USA
OK,
I know Alberta, Saskatchewan and Quebec are in Canada.
Is
it an illusion, or are there more hits from Europe than from the USA ?
Could it be that Europe represents more than 50% of the active newsgroup
developer base ?
Anybody that thinks you don't have to consider XP when developing applications had better think again ! Interesting to see that Win9x is now below 10%, probably time to stop worrying about supporting this OS and stick to Win2000 and XP.
A good range of languages here, of course there will be some people logged here as English language who actually have another native tongue. I wonder why Portuguese shows up here, but there is no "hit circle" in Portugal. Same for Czech ? Also interesting to note that what common sense would suggest was a single hit appears here as 1.06% ! Obviously this stats app wasn't written in dBL !
Very interesting to see that IE has a diminishing share of less than 60%. Disappointing to see that Opera, which is the fastest multi-session browser of the lot only has 9%. Hopefully that will improve. Firefox seems to be gaining in popularity too. Definitely no longer good enough just to develop for IE.
Still developing for 640x480 ? Forget it ! Safe to forget 800x600 ? Probably not, but 1024x768 seems to be what you can expect these days. Interesting to see a few wide screens in there. One third working at 1280x1024 which is probably a resulution more commonly used by developers than users, or maybe not these days with this resolution native on many 17" flat screens.
Hardly worth including this, but it is surprising to find that not everybody is on 32bit colour. Must be a few pretty old machines out there still, and it's a bigger percentage than the Win9x OS share !
Anyway, I hope you found this interesting, but don't read too much into it. It is a very unscientific snapshot survey, and just a bit of fun really.
If you feel that you have been left out, and your country is not represented, then complain in the newsgroups !