Progress

It was a crazy couple of months and I finally got back to writing. Just jumped back into a major change I was adding when I left off. Adding a string input helper function on multiple choice cards. It pops up a list of strings already in the deck and allows you to choose from those items. This will make creating random multiple choice cards much easier because you can simply chose another word that is already in the deck. Stay tuned this train is getting moving again.

The past few months were amazing while learning XNA and working with some students on a game for the Imagine Cup. I'll try and get some time to post a video and website of the game. It didn't make the finals, but I've been trying to figure out how to keep it going now that all but one of the students graduate. It was a ton of fun.

Current development status

The holidays are behind me, sales tax calculations are nearly complete and I've been continuing on developing the set of Spanish Flashcards and adding features to Memorize-it that increase my productivity. Those tools in turn will also increase your productivity when you use Memorize-It. The current cool feature I'm implementing is in adding cards a that are scrambled multiple choice. I'm using those card types in the testing decks for the new quizzer. The conversion was pretty slow because I needed to go find a couple of different items as the incorrect choices from the rest of the deck. I'm in the middle of adding a little pull down to the text boxes that show all the text strings in the current deck and allows you to choose from those. This will save a lot of time in that I will not have to go open another card to cut and paste some other spanish word, I can just select it from a list.

I think it's going to be a very busy couple of months though. I've completely over committed my self in teaching, volunteering and at work. Better to be busy than slow and I always get more done that way, but this is looking a little ridiculous. Stay tuned, hopefully I find some way to stay out of the way of this giant mountain of work that is coming.

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.

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.

Making progress

I was off on vacation for a week and have been back for a few days and getting back into working on the next version of Memorize-It. Before I left I had finished the tabbed test/quiz system in the standalone quizzer. This required a lot of rewriting in the multi-file loading system and cost an extra week's time. Now I'm into the testing side of the house. I had a conversation this morning with a potential customer who was asking about the t-scope feature. He had one idea that I may add to the list of things I'm going to do in v5.

He asked me when it would be done and as usual, I have no idea when something this large is going to be done. The biggest problem being that I'm focused on building a new application/learning system built around Memorize-It Flashcards and once I get that done I still have some polish on Memorize-It to deal with. I've moved into the last big feature on the standalone quizzer/learning system and that as I said is testing. I first have to go back and redo the art for the test pane and I've started that and hope to have it done soon. Once that is done I think I'm into the testing (bug finding and fixing) and installer phase which will be very nice and feel like I'm nearing completion of a huge task. The second biggest problem is that I'm leading a trip to Africa in August and have been working hard on training the team, and I'm starting a new game development class in the fall. Both of those are beginning to impact the Memorize-It development effort.

As usual, don't think delaying your purchase of Memorize-It will make any difference. I offer free upgrades to those who have purchased in the previous 6 months and my upgrade price (for any version of Memorize-It, even 1.0) is $10.

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.