Happy 2021 from DDH Software

[ddhsoftwareadmin]

Hi everyone,

Its been quite a while since I've posted on this forum and I feel that everyone is owed an apology for my continued absence, as well as an up to date status of where things are for DDH Software and HanDBase.

First, off, a Happy New Year to you all. We're all hopeful that 2021 will be a better year than 2020, and its my sincerest hopes that this will apply to HanDBase as well.

As I have posted other times before, as HanDBase sales have winded down over the last years I have been working on other full time jobs and trying to make my ends meet externally. HanDBase at this stage does still have a few sales a day but that's a minor miracle at this point since there have been almost no updates to the apps in a few years now. That doesn't mean I want to throw in the towel, but it does mean I have not put in near enough effort to try to turn things around for it, as much as I've just tried to keep the lights on with the web site and answering support emails and such.

For a while I had hoped that my son Samuel would take over the 'family business', but he just landed a very good job and starts very soon with it. I'm more than excited for him for that! But it does leave me without a succession plan for HanDBase at the moment, and without a real ability to change the fortunes of HanDBase in the near future.

Back in October a very kind and supportive HanDBase user donated some money to DDH Software to help see an update come to the Android version, which is very much in need of an overhaul. It was written back in the Eclipse dev environment days and everything has moved on to Android Studio and newer frameworks. As soon as I received that generous donation I began working on the update to that and was making some good progress. One day my Mac would not turn on and it turned out that my SSD had completely failed. I had backups but they were a few weeks out of date, and so I lost all that work and had to start again. I'm almost to where I was and I hope to soon have a working version that runs on the latest environments. I can then address some of the wifi sync issues that have plagued the Android version for a few revisions now and hopefully release an update this year.

While I did in 2020 make a version of HanDBase for Mac that was compatible with Catalina (and also Big Sur), the app is not registered with Apple, so that is something else I hope to get done this year as well so you don't have to right click to initially launch HanDBase for Mac.

I also hope to release a minor update to the iOS platforms this year to address a few issues.

But as you can see, nothing major is planned for HanDBase in the near future as of now. Its such a travesty to me as well as there is so much more potential for HanDBase and with nearly a million paid customers over the years, a lot of good will has been lost. But those of you who still frequent this forum prove that there is still a loyal base of users and I am one of them as well, so I hope to try to keep things going as best I can. I know that many of you have moved on to platforms that are more actively supported, and I hold no ill feelings towards you- I don't blame you in the slightest. But I'm ever so grateful to the loyal users still with us and I will try to make sure to keep the app running and the site active for all of you.

Thanks for the bottom of my heart and all my best to you and yours!