[Eclass-users] EClass Announcements

[Kevin O. <ke...@tu...>]

Hi all,

You are receiving this message either because you are subscribed to  
the EClass users mailing list, or because you are or have been  
actively involved with the project.

Over the past couple months, I've been doing a lot of work on EClass  
to make cross-platform development quicker and easier, to fix some  
annoying bugs, and to make it easier and faster for me to produce  
test releases. I've finally gotten everything automated, and now I  
can produce releases on demand for both Windows and Mac using a  
simple script.

This also means a new method for producing test releases. From now  
on, test versions will be marked with the date they were produced, to  
make it easy to tell if you have a test or a release version, and  
whether or not you have the latest version. I will also have an email  
sent out to the eclass-users list each time the testing version is  
updated. The latest releases made using this new system can be found  
here:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php? 
group_id=67634&package_id=66945

So, what is in our current testing version?

- We've switched to Unicode, which means EClass can read and write  
data in pretty much any language. This also addresses the filename  
problems we've had with older versions, where the filenames were in a  
character set other than what EClass expected. Unfortunately, Unicode  
is poorly supported on Win 98 and below, so if you need a version of  
EClass for those OSes please let me know. (It can be made to work,  
it's just extra effort.)

- Media files are automatically moved underneath the pub directory.  
This fixes the Windows issues with media files not playing in the  
preview window, and also removes the need to use a "server program"  
to allow the media files to play via CD.

- Contact manager, so you can keep track of people you add for  
credits, etc. You can also import from, or export to, VCards, which  
are used by almost every address book program out there.

- Expanded metadata, so you can store various properties about your  
page.

- After BJ and I did some experimenting with various ways of  
supporting search functions, we switched to Lucene for indexing.  
Lucene is about as scalable as Greenstone (and in fact, Greenstone 3  
will support it), but offers true cross-platform compatibility (no  
need to rebuild indexes for different processors), it lets you define  
metadata fields for searching, and most importantly, you can add/ 
remove/update individual files in the index - you do not have to  
reindex the entire collection on each change. EClass already takes  
advantage of this capability to only (re-)index modified files. I  
still need to work on the CD/web front ends, though.

- Fairly extensive under-the-hood improvements to make creating/ 
designing new interfaces easier (dialog layout is mostly automated  
based on the rules specified in each platform's "interface  
guidelines"), write clean and easy to read code, and avoid  
duplicating code. Also, as a result, most dialogs are resizable. The  
end result is that EClass should require less coding to do things,  
and that means less code to test and debug.

And here's what I'm planning to add in the near future:

- A content analyzer - it will go over your content when requested  
(or before CD/web publishing), checking to see if you have different  
types of media for different types of learning styles, and making  
suggestions based on the results. It will also determine what plugins  
the user will need to view the EClass, if any (and optionally spit  
out a page with links to the players), warn about excessively large  
media files, and check for potentially broken links.

- Learning style profiler: A specialized quiz module that helps  
learners determine their learning style.

- EClass.Library, a program focused on indexing directories of  
content and make them browseable and searchable via web (Win and  
Linux servers) and CD for Windows and Mac platforms, with basic Linux  
support as well. Web interface templates will be HTML-based so  
they're easy to edit in Dreamweaver, etc.

I'd like to thank everyone for their support on the project! It is my  
hope that the project can grow into new areas and become even more  
useful for creating all sorts of instructional materials. I also hope  
to work on the web site and promotional aspects so that the community  
will grow and expand, and so will EClass. :-)

Thanks,

Kevin