Impact version 3.71 released

A new version of the Impact relational database application for RISC OS is now available from the Sine Nomine Software website. You will need to have a licence valid for version 3.70 (released at the Wakefield show) to use the new version.

The main enhancement is to the Import tool. Previously this only supported importing a single CSV or tab-separated text file to load or overlay database records. It has now been enhanced so that you can drop a collection of files or subdirectories onto the tool. In this mode what will be offered for loading is not the contents of the files, but the filenames of all the items dropped on the tool together with columns containing the file size, date and filetype.

If any of the files are JPEGs, then further columns may appear, including captions, height and width of the image, the date/time that the image was captured, and if available the latitude and longitude.

New calculation functions have also been made available to read these values.

These improvements make Impact more convenient for creating a database of photographs. An example photograph database is provided as a tutorial example in section 25.3 of the manual which takes advantage of these new features.

There have also been some bug fixes relating to image rendering and creating a new image field through the import tool.

Just to add that Appendix 4 of the manual is incomplete: another JPEG field that can be read is “comment”. I will update the manual for the next release.

There is now a video to demonstrate using the example photograph database, and you can see the action scripts which pull in information from JPEG files in use.

Just watched the video, nicely done Matthew. Discovered a few options I did know existed even after all these years.

In my demo version of !Impact, I can’t find any export option, CSV for example. Does it exist?

There is an export option in Impact – look for a button on the button bar at the top of a database card for a button with a Green up arrow for export. There are also export option in the table option. Not sure if these option are fully enabled in the ‘demo’ version.

I myself have done two talks/demos on using Impact at WROCC meetings, which will have included exporting at some point. They are on YouTube. www.youtube.com/@WROCC-RISCOS

Silly me, apart from having an old demo version, I never noticed that the button bar can scroll. It’s a very nice program and I just ordered the single licence version.