>We have been using leadtools activeX controls (granted, not free) for displaying images in our application. This control displays an extra empy menu >bar in the windows menu. I have found no way to get rid of that. Second, it tends to bleed through pages of pageframes, leaving artifacts. In the >beginning we also had stability problems with it.

>We started with a free video capture solution, until the incompatibility problems occured in Windows Vista. The author did not develop the tool >anymore, so we went for a paid one.

I don't know what you are doing with video but I for all my image stuff I have used VLC (for the last few years) and I have added ImageMagick for some of the strange stuff. For PDF's Ghostscript (for the last ten years - and now with python). Pyvox is a Python extension module for processing volume images, particularly medical images. Using open source means you have the source - if the guy stops supporting or updating - do it yourself. Not that hard - believe me.

>Same for compression. The compression library from craig boy has shown to have problems, but no chance to have it fixed.

Not sure what you are using but I just use ARC - which in turns has all of the compress tools I've ever needed. I really like 'tar' and 'gz' - keeps the window explorer guys out of the file normally - which means it has a little protection from accidentally opening and changing something.

>We are using MS office to do spell checking. I wish we have never done that. Same for sending emails.

Since switching to python I use STMP (or mail.py) for emails. There is also a python spell checker but I haven't used it.

>We were looking into a way to send text messages. We searched for free solutions and though everyone claimed to have a way to do this, we went with >3rd party software and a text message service provider. I don't need any extra headaches and the costs are absorbed by the client.

My software is sending SMS via python's urllib - works well. Sends about 1000 a week. I use the direct cell provider's web interface (I'm in the states).

>Now we are on a point to do DICOM. There is a lot of free stuff there, but really, I'm scared like hell we pick a solution and down the road we discover >we are on the wrong track. So, I'd better buy a product plus hire a consultant to get us a solution.

There is a python medical open source app - but I can't recall the name (everything starts with "py" and some times it's hard to find the correct name) but I recall looking at the calendar tools it had. But it also had some sort of way to send info to insurance companies. I didn't have a need to send anything to a insurance company. But I have done lot's of different EDI solutions using python.

I use Postgres for a database and it allows me to run python code for functions (functions = MS stored procedures ) which in turn allows me to run almost any python module. But sometimes for a quick app I don't write a Postgres function and just use the class on the client side code.


It's nice to have the source code. Because all of it is in python I can read it and change it if I need too. I'm sure things are not perfect but I'm getting everything done I need and more.

Python has done a lot for me - moving from VFP to python was a learning experience but so far I have been able to do everything I did in VFP and more. It's amazing that the community has provided so much for free. Makes my job so much easier.

Johnf