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.