Company Brief

Kinook Software, Inc. creates, markets and supports productivity tools for the Microsoft Windows platform with the mission to provide high quality software applications that will make using your computer more productive and enjoyable.

The Challenge

Kinook needed to provide an updated GUI with the latest GUI features such as Visual Studio .NET, Office XP and Office 2003-style docking panes, menus, toolbars, etc.

MFC has not been updated to provide built-in support for modern GUI features such as docking panes, customizable toolbars and menus, etc. Most open source solutions are not comprehensive or up-to-date, and most commercial products don’t faithfully match every detail of the GUI behavior users expect and/or have many bugs.

The Solution

Kinook selected Xtreme Toolkit Professional with Visual C++ .NET 7.1 over many other available solutions because Xtreme Toolkit Professional provides a high level of compatibility with existing MFC architecture, and a very faithful implementation of features common in modern Windows GUI applications. Source code availability allows end-user customization of the library as needed. Xtreme Toolkit Professional provided the most robust and complete MFC-compatible implementation of modern GUI features.

Xtreme Toolkit Professional saved Kinook time and money by allowing them to focus solely on developing Visual Build instead of GUI implementation details. “We didn’t have to spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel to provide the GUI functionality that our application needed. Instead, with minimal effort, we were able to leverage the Xtreme Toolkit for this part of our application, allowing us to focus our efforts on implementing other features specific to our application,” said Kyle Alons, President, Kinook Software.

The Results - Visual Build Professional

Kinook’s Visual Build Professional is an affordable build management solution for Windows developers and build masters. It provides a RAD GUI for developing, debugging, and maintaining the build procedure, and it also includes a console application for easily automating the build after it has been created.

Product image [ click to enlarge ]

Visual Build Professional now provides a polished, modern interface with lots of functionality that it didn’t have before. Users can customize many facets of the application look and feel to make it work the way they want. Using Xtreme Toolkit Professional, Visual Build Professional allows you to:

• Save Time and Money - Automating your builds with Visual Build Professional can save many hours of manual effort every month and easily pay for itself in the first month alone.


• Improve Product Quality - By implementing a regular build process, your team’s software quality will improve and bugs will be found and repaired more quickly.


• Avoid Boring Jobs - Visual Build Professional performs the menial, repetitive tasks so you can focus on the fun, challenging stuff.


• Eliminate Key-Person Dependencies - “Tribal knowledge” about the build procedure (often kept only in people’s heads) will be replaced by a documented build framework.

Product URL: http://www.visualbuild.com/

The Results - Ultra Recall

Kinook’s Ultra Recall is a personal information management (PIM) / knowledge management (KM) application for Microsoft Windows. It helps you capture, organize, and recall all of your electronic information across all the applications that you use.

Product image [ click to enlarge ]

Product image [ click to enlarge ]

Existing PIMs tend to be either too simplistic to be very useful or too complicated to figure out. Ultra Recall was designed to provide ease of use along with enough power to handle all of your information management needs.

Product URL: http://www.ultrarecall.com/