status

It has been a slow month for updates, but it looks I finally may have finished the quick test/grade pane which is a good thing. I'm going to be working to integrated that into a standalone quizzer soon and get that new quizzer out the door before the next version of Memorize-It. Next month will probably be slow as well because I'll be in Africa for two weeks and then it usually takes some time to process once you get home from trips like that.

General update

I'm still working on the upgrade and yesterday I finally saw some brighter lights at the end of the tunnel for the new standalone quizzer. I had the quiz portion done and decided to add a test tab to the mix. As usual it required some reworking, sometimes called refactoring. This is a fancy term for tons of work and you end up where you started. It is a common thing in programming, but sometimes you paint yourself into a corner and the only way to get out of the room is to repaint it so you can move on to painting some new rooms. I completed that last week and have made great forward progress again this week.

I did spend a couple of days chasing down a print problem. The first problem had to do with the file name being too long, the second was a formatting error on the blanks USA paper style with the Gutter. It was offset on the page. It has been a long long time since anyone reported a bug in Memorize-It so fixing this took a lot of extra work. The 5.0 version got dropped in 2005 because of a family emergency. When I came back to it last year the compiler I was using was no longer going to be usable. I made a huge shift to a new build environment and continued on. This meant that I had also left the 4.0 version stranded. In order to work on this print problem I had to bring it into the new build environment as well. This was a two day ordeal. When I finally got that working and started adding some instrumentation to the print process I found what I think was the problem. I'm still waiting to hear back if this fixed the problem for the user.

So what does this all mean to you? If you purchase Memorize-It and find a problem that can be fixed. I drop what I'm doing and fix it. If I can't fix it or you are just unhappy about the purchase, I refund your purchase. I'm in this to help you study. I squeeze my expenses so I make a little bit on it each year (a few hundred dollars), but what I really like is to hear that this helped you in some way.

Behind the scenes

For the past few years I've been working on a new version of Memorize-It. Before you decide to hold off on your purchase I have given a FREE upgrade to anyone that has purchased in the 6 months previous to every release. Also, upgrades are always only $10. One of my biggest disappointments with the software industry is the cost of maintenance and yearly updates. It really gets my blood boiling: the yearly cost, the upgrades that are nearly the same price as the original and the crazy schemes that companies come up with the take advantage of you. I never started this venture to make a ton of money. I have a regular job and did this on the side for my own benefit and decided to release it as a product after a few years of refinement. Mostly just to share what I've done with others. Anyway, here is a screenshot of the latest quiz win.


I still have a lot more work to go, but it has been a consistent bit of progress forward for the past six months. Probably a lot longer to go, but I'm excited to finally get this done and have been putting much of my extra time on getting there.