CDE New Technologies (1993-1996)

Originally, the acronym CDE stood for Compact Disk Editions, and was intended for a series of multimedia CD-roms published by the two companies.

"CDE" started off as a joined trademark of two companies: “New Software Research” and "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:

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.

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: _CDEHYP.PAS and GCHYPER.PAS. This is how my coding style looked roughly 20-25 years ago.

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