Meadowlark: Sheffield based computer consultancy

Software development tools we use:

Microsoft Access

Microsoft access is a database, and databases are the most pervasive of computer applications.

Your mobile phone has a database called the address book. Your dvd recorder has a database that tells it when to switch on and record, and your media player has a database to tell it what music it stores.

Databases are so pervasive because they are so useful, and provide a means of collecting, storing, retrieving and presenting information in a structured way, and this is precisely what Microsoft Access does. If you have information that requires care in any of the above, Access may be your best bet.

Why are we Microsoft Access Developers?

Access is the most installed fully featured PC database available. It is present in the Microsoft office suite, and available on its own in various different versions. Alternatively you may have a standalone version installed as part of some third party application.

Access is so popular because it has always had the formidable marketing monster that is Microsoft, baying at its heels and driving it into the public eye and onto PCs. Access also happens to be an excellent development tool in its own right, and at Meadowlark we choose Access for the development of many of our PC desktop databases.

Microsoft Access has a number of advantages:

1. Its a very comprehensive and sophisticated application.
2. It is well integrated with the popular microsoft office suite.
3. It is familiar to generations of PC users.
4. At its more basic level it is quite easy to use.
5. There is a wealth of literature available for it.
6. There is a wealth of training course that cater for it.

Part of the reason we develop using Microsoft Access is that of familiarity. We have been developing database applications for customers with it since it was first available as Access 1.0, and have had more than fifteen years to understand its strengths and weaknesses.

Subsequent versions of Microsoft Access grew in sophistication and scope with the introduction and enhancement of the programming language that underpinned it; visual basic for applications. But the addition of a powerful programming language did not of itself ensure that all Access applications were going to be well designed, structured and implemented applications. To produce good software an application must follow a good design. Indeed this is the basis of our successful relationship with the database development language: we carefully design our applications long before we start writing source code.

 

What you can expect from computer hardware in the future?

1. Smaller faster, cheaper, lighter computers for the desktop.  They will be no larger than a DVD drive.  They will be silent, and run free software, and much of this will be web based.  They will use solid state disks, and large quantities of cheap memory.

2. More powerful mobile phones will largely replace traditional PCs and laptops.  The screens of mobiles will occupy as much of the phone as physicallly possible.  "Soft buttons will have largely replaced mechanical buttons in top of the range phones.

3. Sophisticated screen display technology will be available that will allow us to use bigger computer monitors in smaller less likely workplaces.

4. Micro-factories: places of work no bigger than a loft extension, where budding entrepreneurs labour in their free time "printing" products with 3D printers and selling their wares by the internet.