Question Writer Blog

I've created a video tutorial today outlining how to create new themes with Publisher Edition. It shows how to override the different properties and gives an explanation for each of the important elements. There's also some information on this in the manual.

It's not necessary to override every property to create a new theme. You'll usually only need to override some of the elements to create the effect you want. Indeed, it would be very unusual to need to override some of the code elements, like the Flash or movie control components for example.

Posted by Alexander at 04:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've upgraded the randomization features in Quiz Edition.

What was the problem? All the questions were being bundled into a single Flash quiz but only the randomly selected questions were being asked. Because of all of the extra, unused questions, the file size was very large, the order of the randomly selected questions was fixed, the test was slower, and the maximum number of questions was smaller.

Now Quiz Edition creates a specified number of pre-randomized quizzes and randomly selects which quiz the user will take. That means -

1. The quizzes are much faster
2. The order as well as the selection is random
3. Virtually no maximum number of questions in the question bank
4. Smaller file size

If you've been using Quiz Edition to create randomized tests, especially with a large bank of questions, you'll see a huge improvement with the new update.

Tip: Change the number of pre-randomized quizzed created using
Quiz Properties -> Advanced Settings -> Number of Pre-Randomized Quizzes To Generate

Posted by Alexander at 02:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

All versions of Question Writer are now Vista compatible. That includes Personal Edition, Quiz Edition and Publisher Edition. I was a bit sceptical about Vista at first, fearing it was the new Windows Millenium, but I hear now that while it is a small proportion of Windows installs, there are already more computers running Vista than all Macintosh OSes and Linux combined.

Posted by Alexander at 03:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)