Alpha Quizzer version released

The first alpha version of the new standalone quizzer went alpha last night. If you are interested in selling flashcards using this new quiz system, please send me an e-mail and we can talk about getting you into the pre-release system.

So far, I've created a Spanish language set with it and have been using it myself for the past month as I try to learn Spanish and also make sure the quizzer really works as a learning tool.

Here is a screen shot of the quiz window. No one liked the green buttons in an early mock up and I'll be changing that soon. Opinions welcome.

The next splash image

That last splash image was just a little too childish and I needed something a little more bold to represent the market I think this program fits in. High School, College and Adult students needing to memorize any type of information. Here is the image.

The actual drawing went something like this. I found an image of a charging elephant online and used my favorite image editing software Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 (usually less than $50) to draw a black and white sketch of a charging elephant. I also recommend Gimp which is free and have used it in some of the computer classes I have taught.

I used a Wacom Intuos3 6 x 8-Inch Pen Tablet to do the actual drawing. The original image is 8x10 inches at 200dpi good for use if I ever need to do any package printing.

The charging elephant picture was placed in it's own layer and given a lot of transparency so it was just sort of an outline. A less technical trick would be to use a Lightbox. I did the tracing and added the rotated rectangle as a flashcard representation. I then got rid of the original charging elephant and selected all the black lines. I inset the selection and filled that selection with black in yet another layer. I then filled the various sections with primary colors and ran an Effects/Illumination/Sunburst effect centered on the light bulb (which was primary yellow). I then tried a ton of different trial and error effects to get the final rendering. I think the one I finished with was either Artistic/Hot Wax or Artistic/Enamel. I don't fully remember, but it took a hundered different tries. I went back and made the center of the lightbulb a lot more yellow to help the bulb stand out after one of my reviewers made that suggestion. The original drawing in the layer above this was then turned back on to give the distict black lines over the colorization.

After years and years trying to come up with a new elephant, this one was drawn in about 30 minutes and colored in about an hour.

Possible splash image

I've been working on the about screen for the new standalone quizzer and have the first concept. I think it might be too kid like and will be creating at least one more. Opinions welcome.

More features and cleanup in the standalone quizzer

I added more features and cleaned up some more bugs in the standalone quizzer. There was no way to quiz on hard, med-hard or percent in the new quizzer. Since all of these items are handled on the menu system in Memorize-It I could have just added a menu to the standalone quizzer, but I ended up adding a small drop box to the quizzer itself. I think it keeps the application a lot cleaner. I'll try to add a screen shot on a future post.

I also added a way to set the auto quiz delay and a preferences menu item to all for the minimum number of quizzes per card. The auto quiz delay was also on a menu and is now a button above the quiz card. The preferences needed to be added as there will probably be some other things I'll have to add to the preferences so this was a good infrastructure change. I need to create another installer and do some more testing and see how close I am to letting others look at it.

On the development agenda next is an "About" screen. You would think this would be simple, but I can't even begin to describe the amount of time that went into the Memorize-It about screen. It has a ton of code to show different about screens for different serial numbers and licensees. If there is one place in the code that could use some clean up, that would probably be near the top.

Still moving along nicely...

serial number systems and installers

Last night I took a huge step and completed the trial and for sale serial number system and an installer for a small collection of Spanish decks. This is a test and would require a bunch more work on the flashcard side, but I'll be testing this out on my own and probably fine tune a little bit more before I send it out to some of my reviewers. This has been a long time coming and it feels good to have an actual product shaping up.

This is just the upgraded quizzer system. Once I have one or two of these done I'll go back and finish Memorize-It which needs just a few more features and then I'll ship that. No timeline on either, but I am making progress.

Stay tuned.

Installer and Optimizer

I've been working on the installer for a sample stand alone quiz application. Like everything else it ends up getting stalled with more small problems. The latest was a tough one that took me a few days to find. When I built the application as a "Release" application which removes debug information and optimizes the machine code of the application. At that point it started having really strange problems and the only way to debug is by printing information to a log file. After a lot of digging I found a simple boolean variable that was not being initialized. All that work for a simple variable that wasn't set. Now I'm back to working on the installer and general application cleaning. Good progress.

As usual if you are going to wait on your purchase, I offer free upgrades for everyone who purchases within 6 months prior to an upgrade so it won't cost you any extra if you purchase today. Plus, upgrades are going to be $10 (maybe $15) so it's not like it'll be unaffordable.

Cleaning and Polishing

I'm at the state in the development process where I am cleaning and polishing the Standalone Quizzer. I do this by working towards creating a final product (in this case Spanish Flashcards) and using the program myself. Each time I find a problem I add it to a growing and shrinking list and work towards removing everything from the list. In general this has been going smoothly and a lot quicker than I expected. It is frustrating at times to get stalled with a problem or a bug at every corner since the changes I've made are in every piece of code, but with persistence I'm making great strides.

Part of the problem is that I also have to fix problems in the Memorize-It version that it not as far along. A new quiz card style of Scrambled Multiple Choice took up a lot of time recently as I had failed to add the new card type to a couple of sections of the code. Specifically to do with testing and copy and past of cards. I also had to go back and add some more information to the test list to show the last, best and average percentage on tests taken on a specific topic. Here is a screen shot of that section I just added.

As I was using the program I didn't think the testing was going to work with just the average percentage which is something I would not have known if I wasn't eating my own cooking as we like to say.

I find myself wanting to create an alpha version and send it out to the people who have been waiting patiently for the standalone quizzer. I keep having to force myself to take a step back and keep fixing problems as I know that sending something out that has a bunch of bugs is a sure way to loose any sort of interest in later releases that are more stable. I'm going to keep cleaning and polishing until I have something that works for me (without crashing every two seconds) and then I'll send it out for review and comment. Patience.

As usual, don't let this knowledge of a new program keep you from purchasing the existing Memorize-It. I offer free upgrades for anyone who purchased in the previous six months of the release and upgrades are typically only $10.0, but I may increase that to $15 as the price of gas has increased a little since 1994 when I set that as the upgrade price...

Standalone Quizzer Productization

Big news is that after a few years I finally have all the new features into the standalone quizzer. I just finished the testing system yesterday. I'm starting on a new path to make some flashcard products around the quizzer and begin refining. I'm going to start with Spanish since I already have that content. There are still a lot of loose ends and cleanup that will be happening, but the major structure is done and it's on the the next steps.

Conclusion in sight

I was gone for about a month in preparing, working and recovering from our trip to Africa. Always and amazing experience and this was no different. Tons of work and worth every minute of lost sleep.

That said, I've been back to working on Memorize-It and today hit what I would call a huge milestone. I'm really beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel for the standalone quizzer. I have the quizzing and the testing working. I'm not sure if I'm going to start working on the installation or one last feature in saving past test scores. I'll probably add that last feature to testing and continue to consider how the installation will work. If I can continue to get some consistent time in I think I can finally see this product reaching the door. Very exciting and too much time spent already to even begin to contemplate.