Wondershare Quiz Creator

I noticed there are a few quiz creators in the market some of which are desktop programs which run locally on the user’s computer. There are also however some online quiz creators but I did not find them appealing not because of their features and functionality but because of their dependence on having an internet connection in order to use them. Dependence on internet to use a program and the fact that you don’t own the program to be able to create quizzes on demand and at will is a turn off for me. I found three desktop quiz creator programs that really caught my attention; QuizBuilder, QuizMaker, and QuizCreator. Each of these quiz creators are themselves not bad and have basic building blocks of any quiz but I took a hard look at where they stand in terms of price, features, that set them apart from the other two quiz creators. I found that QuizCreator has the right balance of features and price. In other words, QuizCreator has many advanced features for a reasonable price. QuizCreator edged out as a clear winner to me.

The user interface is very clean and uncluttered. It is in fact very intuitive and all functions and buttons are easily accessible. Quiz Creator supports nine different types of questions.

· Multiple Choice Single Response

· True or False

· Multiple Choice Multiple Response

· Fill in the Blank

· Matching

· Sequence

· Word Bank

· Click Map

· Short Essay

Each of these question types can be easily added with just a single mouse click. Each type of question supports the following.

· Customizable font settings.

· Separate feedback for the correct and incorrect answer per question.

· In some questions such as multiple choice questions a separate feedback can be provided for every multiple choice.

· Feedback can be customized using fonts, colors, picture, equation, and a custom audio.

· Branching to continue to the next question, finish the quiz, or jump to a specific question.

· Scoring can be done per answer or per question.

· An image can be imported or a screen capture inserted into the question or answer.

· An illustration can be added to a question to provide visual cue or picture relevant to the question.

· Separate audio can be imported or recorded live for every question.

· A very useful feature in Quiz Creator is Text to Speech conversion where with one mouse click the text question can be converted to speech.

· Flash format (SWF or FLV) movie can be inserted for every question.

· An equation editor is available to insert equations into the questions and answers. This feature is particularly useful in creating questions involving equations.

· A notes editor is also available to include additional information about the question or the answer to the quiz taker.

· Each question can be previewed using a preview button without having to run the entire quiz.

· Five difficulty levels namely very easy, easy, moderate, difficult, very difficult are available which can be set per question.

· The number of times (attempts) the quiz taker is allowed on a question is also configurable giving the quiz author flexibility in controlling the number of retry attempts per question.

· Each question has a user configurable scoring system where points can be assigned for correct or incorrect answer. Positive points and negative points are available in the scoring system where positive points can be assigned for correct answer and negative points for incorrect answer. Of course the number of points per question whether positive or negative is configurable.

Quiz Creator provides ability to add custom quiz properties to tailor the quiz to suit ones needs. The information includes quiz title, author information, introductory page, quiz image, quiz statistics, time limit for the entire duration of the quiz, time limit for each question, submit answer one question at a time or all at once, show answer immediately after submitting a question, allow quiz taker to review answers, number of quiz attempts, random presentation of quiz questions, quiz passing percent, show customized message for a correct answer or incorrect answer, display quiz statistics, take quiz taker to a specific web page depending upon if the quiz taker passed or failed the quiz, password protect the quiz, globally set points, difficulty, feedback, font or randomization of questions to apply to the entire quiz.

Quiz Creator provides many quiz player templates that can be customized by adjusting the theme, background color, toolbar color, panel color, highlight color, appearance of paper, background sound, and quiz text and label settings. Quiz author can also control the layout of the quiz by adjusting the image location, number of columns for choices, numbering of questions, and display settings such as quiz title, capability to print, audio icon, question flag, question points, question type, etc.

Quiz Creator also provides capability to preview the entire quiz without having to publish the quiz. This is a useful feature when you want to test the quiz for bugs or errors and fix them before actually publishing and releasing the quiz to end users.

Quiz Creator provides capability to publish the quiz to many common multimedia formats including Flash for easy deployment on the web, SCORM or AICC package for LMS, Auto Play Exe for CD delivery, or Word/Excel quiz for easy printing and distribution using hard or soft copies.

Overall QuizCreator by Wondershare is an excellent quiz making software that is very easy to use, produces quizzes that are professional, secure, interactive, fun, rich in multimedia, easy to deploy and distribute, and above all is very cost effective. This is a must have for anyone interesting in developing quizzes. Make a Quiz and Get QuizCreator 50% off.

Technorati Tags: Wondershare,QuizCreator,Quiz,Quiz Creator

Wildform Flair 5

 

In a previous post I wrote about Flair 4, a truly comprehensive, all in one multimedia software that is a one stop shop for all multimedia, e-learning, animation, and presentation needs of anyone looking to produce rich, interactive, and professional flash based multimedia. A new version of Flair i.e., Flair 5 is now available for immediate use. Flair 5 keeps alive yet again the tradition of Wildform to provide simple yet powerful multimedia software while leveraging the functionality in existing tools and technology. This new version is packed with new features, compatible with latest Windows 7 operating system, and noticeably robust.

One of a key new feature in Flair 5 includes innovatively overcoming the 9 minute time limit inherent to flash presentations by allowing users to chain flash files in a single project and automatically playing them in a sequence and making it appear as a single flash presentation. Another new feature also enables users to bypass the time limit by essentially adding and linking cue points to other SWF files in a FLV video file to author videos of pretty much any duration. Flair 5 also has new player controls, presentation templates, backgrounds, animated icons, accents, animation effects and numerous other enhancements that enhance a user’s ability to produce high quality flash video presentations and bring out the best in those presentations without much difficulty, time and effort.

Flair 5 is a step in the right direction for Wildform to provide unified multimedia creation software that convincingly edges out other pricey players in the market.

 

Technorati Tags: Flair,Wildform,Flash

DemoCreator Review

DemoCreator 3 by Wondershare is very good screen recording software that provides very easy and minimal steps to produce a high quality, interactive, and professional looking screen recording in many popular formats. DemoCreator lets anyone with any level of screen recording experience to be able to record tutorials, product demos, software simulations, and interactive presentations in as little as three simple steps. One has to simply record, edit, and publish the screen recording without spending too much time on it. DemoCreator makes this possible by making it easy to record, providing a friendly user interface to edit recording, and making it easy to publish to many video formats.

DemoCreator makes it very easy to record any area on the desktop by providing three options; one can choose to record the entire screen, a particular application window, or a specific region on the screen. These recording options give the user flexibility to control what needs to be shown in the recording.

Additionally, DemoCreator further simplifies recording by making use of wizards to let users customize recording and whether to record cursor movements, keyboard activity, narration, etc. These are basic and fundamental recording features that are made very easy to customize prior to recording.

DemoCreator also lets users specify settings for recordings and customize the appearance and behavior of the output videos. These settings can be accessed by calling up the settings window. The settings window has many useful options that define the appearance and behavior of the output video and thus enable users to tailor the videos to suit their needs. Some of the useful settings include video size, background color, video loading duration, audio settings, keyboard hotkeys for starting, pausing, stopping and other actions to take during recording, define the control bar with customizable player controls, author information, and other output settings. I think these settings are very useful not only because they let you customize the videos but allow you to add your own unique style and fingerprint to your videos.

After recording the screen DemoCreator provides three options; Users can preview the recording, edit the recording, or publish the recording directly to the available output video formats.

More often than not users would want to edit the recording to customize and enhance the recording and give it finishing touches. When you choose to edit the recording DemoCreator opens up the main program window and allows users to edit the recording.

The editing window has many components that make the process of editing recording very simple and straightforward. The window is divided into three sections with a toolbar at the top. As can be seen from the screenshot above you have Office 2007 style user interface which is very easy to use. The middle section is where the recording can be previewed. The left section shows the thumbnails of recording and provide for quick and easy navigation to various stages in the recording. The bottom section is the timeline editor which shows the recording on a time scale. This is also the place where user embedded illustration objects with their durations are shown.

Once you are in this window and are ready to edit recording there are several options to choose from to edit the recording. First, users can enhance the recording by adding illustrations. They can do so by adding annotations using the different styled callouts. The callouts can be customized to change their style, how they appear and disappear (Fade in/Fade out), their location, appearance, and text.

DemoCreator also provides buttons, actions, click zones, edit entry box, textbox, and many cool flash animation objects to add interactivity to the recording. These elements when used correctly can make recording exciting, interesting, engaging, and interactive.

DemoCreator also provides a means to draw attention and highlight details in the recording by the zoom and pan technology. The zoom and pan feature is a very useful feature that allows showing part of the recording to viewers by zooming. This lets viewer’s focus on the details the recorder is intending to show. Zoom and Pan is very simple and intuitive to set up in the recording where the area to be zoomed in is selected with the help of a rectangle and the zoom duration and scale are specified.

Last but certainly not the least is the ability to include sound and narration in the recording to add a human touch and life to the video. DemoCreator makes this happen by providing simple tools to record sound or import audio from external sources and add to recording. Adding audio to recording is indeed very easy to do. One other aspect of recording that is sometimes very useful is adding silence in the recording and DemoCreator enables this with the simple click of a button and specifying the duration and location where silence should be added.

Finally, after the completion of editing it is time to publish the recording to a video format for viewing and distribution. DemoCreator provides options to publish the recording to popular formats such as Flash, Video (AVI, WMV, MOV, MP4, FLV, MPEG-2, 3GP), SCORM or AICC compliant LMS, EXE for distribution on CD/DVD, MP4 for YouTube, or Flash demo attachment for email delivery. As part of publishing process depending upon the publishing option DemoCreator allows resolution, size, scale, quality, format, encoding, etc. of output videos to be customized.

DemoCreator is easy to use screen recording software that can produce rich, interactive, professional, tailor made, easily shareable, easily distributable, and video formats. DemoCreator can be downloaded from http://www.sameshow.com/demo-creator.html.

Technorati Tags: DemoCreator

SSW Code Auditor

 

Developers of .NET programs face many challenges in developing applications not the least of which is trying to stay consistent and following best coding practices. It is not uncommon to find variations in coding even though code was developed by the same person. The problem of inconsistent and bad coding is amplified when working in teams and exacerbated when developing large and/or complex programs despite having written coding standards and best practices. One can argue that if developers follow written standards and best practices then the problem can be mitigated but this has been proven wrong time and again and over reliance on developers without proper and timely checks is not only futile but also not prudent and ineffective. Any and all coding issues need to be identified early on during code development in order to be cost effective and develop good quality code. One can also argue in favor of manually checking the code for such inconsistencies but that is just not practical and is ineffective. What is really needed is a solution that is easy to use, flexible, automated, reliable, and developed by experienced professionals. SSW Code Auditor developed by Superior Software for Windows (SSW) is one such code analyzer and auditor that enables developers to identify and fix code bugs and inconsistencies early on in the development process. SSW Code Auditor is a one stop shop for enforcing coding standards and best practices to ensure quality software development in a cost effective manner. It is a simple and professional solution to effectively manage coding practices and standards by also providing ability to have custom audit rules and automate auditing of multiple .NET projects at the same time.

Installation of SSW Code Auditor is simple and very intuitive. I installed it on Windows 7 without any problems. The application itself is very easy to use. SSW Code Auditor provides two easy methods to audit code: from the Visual Studio add-in and from Windows start menu. I use Visual Studio 2008 and the add-in was added automatically by the installation. The add-in is visible as a toolbar in Visual Studio IDE and is easily accessible. Some of the options may be different depending on whether the audit was run from the start menu or visual studio add-in. For instance, the add-in can audit the currently opened project file and does not have email option. There is practically little to no learning curve involved in using the code auditor. Furthermore, the code auditor wizard walks through the auditing process from beginning to finish and makes it a breeze for anyone wishing to audit their code. The wizard feature is a great time saver. The wizard enables users to hit the ground running without spending too much time trying to figure out how to do things.

I think one of the key features of SSW Code Auditor is the extensive set of predefined rules and the ability to create new rules to tailor the auditing process to suit ones requirements. Admittedly, some of the rules identify the most common bad practices or mistakes that I make as a developer and this is evident from the audit report shown in a screenshot later in this review. For instance, I use VbCrlf a lot and there is a rule that identifies this practice and suggests that the best practice is to use “Environment.NewLine”. There are many other user interface related best practices that I often ignore which are promptly identified by the code auditor. These rules not only promote best practices but also enable code optimization. I think the built in wizard is a great strength of the code. In addition, I think the ability to have different set of rules for different audit jobs is also a very useful feature. Another huge plus point in SSW Code Auditor is the ability to create many jobs with the ability to audit many projects in a job and add to that the ability to schedule the audit jobs you get a powerful automated audit process. One more feature of SSW Code Auditor that will be extremely useful to users is the ability to have the audit report emailed to any number of recipients either on demand or on schedule. Last but certainly not the least; in fact the most prominent feature of SSW Code Auditor is the output audit report that is generated after the audit. The audit report is very detailed, intuitive, and organized. The report is in XML format. The report contains the summary of the audit results and links to the problem areas in the analyzed code. The report is well organized and presented in such a way that it is very easy to navigate to the lines of code that have been identified as having issues based on the rules executed as part of the audit. The audit report can be customized to show the results by the rules that failed or by the files that were analyzed. Regardless how the results are ordered the report contains the line number(s) in the project file and links to those lines of code that failed the rules. The links when clicked take you directly to the project file with the lines of code that have failed the rules. Basically, the report is easy to work with, very user friendly, and very detailed.

In conclusion, SSW Code Auditor is a very good, multi-featured code auditing software that is very easy to use. It is a one stop shop for analyzing and auditing .NET code. It allows anyone with any type of skill level to use the software for auditing code. The wizard helps make the audit process a breeze. The extensive predefined rules coupled with the support for the creation of custom rules ranging from basic to advanced complexity is a strong feature of SSW Code Auditor. SSW Code Auditor lets anyone accomplish the goal of having bug free, consistent, good quality software. SSW Code Auditor is very easy to use yet very powerful; provides many advanced features, and provides wizard functionality to assist user in code audit. There is no doubt developers across the board ranging from beginners to experts will find SSW Code Auditor a very useful and cost effective means of developing good quality, error free coded applications.

Add-in code audit screenshots:

Start menu code audit screenshots: