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gs-soft mssstick image

gs-soft builds MssStick for Windows desktop and Windows 8 tablet using Delphi XE2

gs-soft was founded in Switzerland in 1986 and focuses on the development of Mission Critical Software. In the last 20 years, while working with Swiss Armed Forces, it became apparent that command systems had become harder to use and understand. This together with the complexity of new systems and a lack of time for education and training motivated gs-soft to come up with a very simple, flexible solution that helps troops get what they need, faster.

gs-soft has three components to their solution: MSS, Milx and MssStick.

MSS (Military Symbol Service) is the common visualization layers using national and international standards for symbols and tactical graphics. MilX (Military Exchange Service) is a very powerful but light solution to exchange information between different systems. MssStick, built with Delphi, is gs-soft’s solution to help create and manage military map layers and design military reference grid systems as well as organize military structure and resources. It can easily be shared and exchanged between partners in the military workflow.

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Professor Niklaus E. Wirth, who is a Swiss computer scientist, was well known for designing several programming languages including Pascal. “Delphi was the best known modern programming language in Switzerland at the time,” says Guenther Schoch, gs-soft CEO. “During the years we did look at other IDEs including Visual Studio but at the time felt that Delphi was far ahead with its revolutionary Visual Component Library (VCL).” Now, all the software on MssStick including the Auto-Updating system has been developed using Delphi.

“Thanks to Delphi, our applications have incredible performance running on all the different types of military hardware,” says Guenther. Delphi applications are 100% native, taking full advantage of the power and speed of the CPU and GPU. gs-soft used the new RTTI extension which allowed them to write attribute based code.

The MssStick environment includes two applications: MssDraw, which generates military map layers and MssComposer, which helps create organizational structures. The tool was designed to be very flexible and can be operational within minutes. There is no installation required to start the application nor is a long preparation phase needed. MssStick helps accelerate operational planning and enables more efficient coordination between different organizations including the Armed Forces, Police, Civil Defense and the Media. Using MssStick is easy. You can plug the MssStick into a USB-port and start the program to launch a sample military exercise.

Currently, 12 developers are working on the MssStick project. gs-soft is now testing the MssStick for the first time on a Windows 8 tablet. “The MssStick applications have performed great on the tablet,” says Guenther. “This is due to two things; Delphi’s rich capabilities and the adjustments we’ve done in the area of map handling.”

gs-soft customers include the Swiss Army and Government and Swiss Nuclear Power Plants. For more information you can check out the gs-soft website at http://www.gs-soft.com/CMS/