====== CDE New Technologies (1993-1996) ======

{{ charon:past:cde1.jpg|CDE#1 Catalog Player}}

[[http://www.cde.si|"CDE"]] started off as a joined trademark of two companies: "New Software Research" and [[http://www.adacta.si|"Adacta"]]. Originally, the acronym CDE stood for Compact Disk Editions, and was intended for a series of multimedia CD-roms published by the two companies.

The first title, CDE#1 was published in 1993, when CD-roms were still fairly rare. It was a multimedia catalog of the INFOS-93 fair in Ljubljana, filled up with images, animations and hypertext, which was also still in its infant stage. The player application was designed and developed by Matej Žvan and myself.

I made some promo animations for NSR and CDE for the catalog, using 3D Studio 3.0. Here they are:

[[http://www.sinistersystems.com/files/charon/Butterfly.wmv|Movie: Butterfly.wmv (1993)]]

[[http://www.sinistersystems.com/files/charon/Charon.wmv|Movie: Charon.wmv (1992)]]

CDE#1 was followed by CDE#2, #3 and #4 over the next two years. These were mostly shareware CD-roms as it was the trend. However, at about the same time, CDE was transformed into a full company and renamed "CDE Nove Tehnologije" ("CDE New Technologies").

**Digital Telephone Dictionary**

One of the first products developed by CDE was the national telecom's first digital telephone dictionary, to be published both on floppy and CD-rom. While the Adacta half of the team covered the database, the rest of us (mostly myself) dealt with the graphical user interface and the application as a whole.

It was a succesfull and fairly bug-free piece of software. Unfortunatelly, Adacta split off CDE closely after the project was done, taking the original customer along with them.

{{charon:past:butterfly_001_0001.jpg }} {{ charon:past:charon_0001.jpg }}

**Multimedia phase**

After that and for a certain period of time, CDE focused mostly on multimedia. At that time, I specialized mostly in system and common libraries, user interface widgets design and other shared components, and spent much less time on writing actual applications. Among other things, I coded a fairly advanced hypertext control, which was then used across pretty much every application we developed.

When I say 'fairly advanced', I mostly mean the following features:

  * Every aspect of rendering is customizable, by providing a function alternative to default, ie:
    * Text rendering: make your own style and render text with shadow, outlined or gradient.
    * Background rendering: make a static image for background and let the text scroll on top of it.
    * Take control over scrolling and window resizing.
    * Render any kind of information in frames, or simply insert a child window containing animation or dynamic visualisation.
  * Text selection using the mouse in addition to just clicking hyperlinks.
  * Smart tabs with any possible alignment.

The hypertext control source can be viewed here: 
[[http://www.sinistersystems.com/files/charon/_CDEHYP.PAS.txt|_CDEHYP.PAS]] and 
[[http://www.sinistersystems.com/files/charon/GCHYPER.PAS.txt|GCHYPER.PAS]]. This is how my coding style looked roughly 10-15 years ago.

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[[charon:past:neurodancer|Next: Neurodancer (1994)]]