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Text Characters - 'It Just Works'
My philosophy on software design is that the software should 'just work' and the software should automatically try to fix problems it knows about rather than sending you off looking for support. Here's a new fix that illustrates the idea.
If you've used QW2 with special characters - you might have seen a small box shown instead of the character you were hoping to see. A picture is worth a thousand words . . like this . . .
It happens when the special character isn't available in the font - this happens quite a lot with numerical symbols, and Japanese or other foreign language characters. You can fix it by changing the font - but I'd rather it 'Just Worked' first time.
So now, if it is finds a missing character, it'll substitute in a character from a font (MS Sans Serif) that will usually have the character available . . . like this . . .
So there will be users concerned about the typography . . . those users need to make a more considered choice of font for best effect . . . but for most users with the occasional special characters - it 'just works'.
Posted by Alexander on March 17, 2008 | Text Characters - 'It Just Works'| TrackBack
Define Results Script
Another new feature in QW3 - this is more technical, but if you're using your own script to process results, you can now define your own server in your quiz in the Web Settings -
You can also define the backup server, which is used if the main server can't be reached. If you're not using a backup server, just make this the same as the main server, and the quiz will continue to try to reach the main server until it is reachable.
Posted by Alexander on March 12, 2008 | Define Results Script| TrackBack
Negative Scoring Limit
Here's another feature that I've just added to the Alpha - it effectively sets a minimum score of 0 for Partial Credit questions by default.
Say you have a question that includes negative scoring, but you don't want to allow an overall negative score to be offset against other scores in the quiz - you'd leave this switched off. If you want to discourage guessing so that a wrong answer on one question will offset a correct answer in another section, switch it on.
Posted by Alexander on March 12, 2008 | Negative Scoring Limit| TrackBack
Polish GUI
We've just added Polish to our list of supported languages in Question Writer 3.
Did you know that in Poland, men and women will often use different forms of the same surname in the same family, men using the variant ending in 'ski' and women the one ending in 'ska'? You learn something new every day.
Posted by Alexander on March 7, 2008 | Polish GUI| TrackBack
Online Results
If you haven't looked at it yet - do check out the online results system. This allows you to view all of your results in the same place so that you can view them as a list rather than trying to organize all the e-mails. It's got results going back to September 2007, so if you've been using the results-by-email service for a while, you'll already have plenty of data stored to view online.
Posted by Alexander on March 5, 2008 | Online Results| TrackBack