Construction in the home office - formerly known as The Bunker - has displaced me from time to time this past week, and will continue to do so for the next two weeks. What better excuse to wander the five miles over to the new (December 2006) Clifton Park/Halfmoon Public Library building, a gorgeous new fixture in town not far from Clifton Park Center?

Now THIS is a nice library! Two stories, wide open with a mezzanine floating second floor. Nice Borders' style seating areas all around the perimeter of the building under the two story windows that look out onto a reading garden that will be great once the trees get blooming in a couple of weeks. FAST wireless Internet available to anyone who wanders in and plently of public computer workstations all over the place for people without their own laptops, all with real Herman Miller chairs.



From a preliminary wander around, they've got a pretty good selection of books in the joint as well - along with a computer lab, a meeting room that can hold 250 people comfortably, a gorgeous Teen Center and Kids' area, everything you might want.

Staff couldn't be more helpful, either. The parking lot, often somewhat empty when they first opened, is filling up more and more these days, as well it should. This is a really nice addition to the area. It feels as much like Charlotte/Mecklenburg as it does Saratoga County. Nice to see this kind of stuff available here.

Heaven forbid we ever stop developing stuff! This is still some months away, but it is very much on the front burner at Steamboat. Some really tight new design and logic is going to be the keynote of this revision.

As usual, we've been collecting ideas and requests as they come up for inclusion in the next release. And as usual, most of the best ideas come from the cops and not from us.

Look for more interaction with outside data sources - scanning license information in for Name records, for instance. We're also continuing to push the new Name/Incident logic we introduced in the v8 rewrite. Under the hood, v9 features a ground-up rewrite of the program's relationship/ER logic to the new Anchor-Buoy standard, making the whole thing tougher than ever.

Interestingly, development this time is coinciding with a complete remodel/renovation of the Steamboat office - starting over from bare concrete walls - that has me particularly spending a good deal of time at the new Clifton Park library and the Borders store to get away from the noise of construction. In four weeks though, it's going to look pretty good around here!

That's right... who says no one takes pride in their work anymore? Humbug!