With the decision to really go back to Druware as more than a consulting company, the next step for us is to establish our product line. Doing this means picking from some projects and choosing the ones that we are best suited to producing over the long term, and those with which we can generate a reasonable income from. Unfortunately, this meant that a couple of projects that had been in progress have been deferred or canceled, while we focus on the projects that we, as a group, are best suited to doing.
Because of our extensive database background, and our continued frustrations with the lack of robust tools on the Mac platform, that is where we have chosen to go. Unfortunately, that means things like our little XMLEditor, Collection Manager and others have gone away. They just don't fit the business we want and need to be in, and maintaining them is a waste of precious resources at this point in time.
With that in mind, we will be focusing on four related projects initially. Two are already available from us as Open Source projects, and that will not change. ODBCKit, our Open Source Framework and Tools will remain that way, with one exception. We will not be enhancing the the Automator Actions in the ODBCKit, as the enhanced and extended versions will be part of a new product, the Database Actions Pack. In addition we have the PostgreSQL for Mac project which will continue. There will be support products available for both the ODBCKit and PostgreSQL starting August 15.
Which brings us to the two new projects. The first has already been mention, the Database Actions Pack, which is a collection of Automator Actions for ODBC and direct PostgreSQL actions for accessing and processing data using Automator. This effectively turns Automator into a Data Transformation Automation Tool for the Mac, but also allows for desktop workflows to incorporate data from the corporate databases. Part of this package will be a few example workflows that we use with these actions internally. The other new product is PostgreSQL Data Studio. Conceptually, this project is a database centric 'management and reporting tool', that also fills light developer and DBA usage. At the moment, this product is the furthest from complete, so we are estimating Q1 08 for an initial release, and as such it will be a Leopard only release.
So that is a start. We will revisit the product line every quarter as we move forward, but expect the product line to remain database centric for the foreseeable future.