Friday, February 23, 2007

Adding a CC License to your eXe content

A new eXe has been released today, version 0.21. One of the relatively new features of eXe is the ability to easily add a range of Creative Commons licenses to your published content.

To add a license switch to the Properties pane by clicking on the Properties tab above the authoring space. Select the license you wish to add by using the dropdown menu. Be sure to clickon the "Done" button before returning to the Authoring pane or your additions will not be saved.

Click for larger image.

The license will be added to the bottom of your content when you export. A link will be provided to the actual online version of the license.

Thursday, February 01, 2007

eXe 0.20 released

It has been a long couple of months since our last official release. Since not everyone is daring enough to try the nightly builds, we needed a new release to get some of the many new features and dozens of bug fixes out to the user community. We backed out one particularly invasive change and allowed a few days for testing and tweaking.

Among the new features in version 0.20:
  • added Geogebra option to the Java iDevice plugin
  • optional footer on all pages of your project
  • dramatically improved loading speed for some complex .elp packages
  • backup crash recovery scheme
  • clearer iDevice editor user interface
  • first pass at SCORM2004 export
There have also been dozens of bug fixes and work arounds added.

While we still have a few significant features on our roadmap before reaching the mythical version 1.0, we will be working hard to stabilize the application and fix outstanding issues. We will try to release more frequently so that the user community can take advantage of this (and point out things that still need work).

We welcome feedback in the Eduforge eXe forums. Or if you run into a bug, you can report it in our issue tracker. Please search to see if someone else has already reported the problem, and if so add any clarifications that you can to their "ticket" to make it easier for us to reproduce the issue. You can add new tickets, but please be sure to give us information about the exact version of eXe and the operating system you are using along with any steps (or sample files) necessary to duplicate the problem.

We are also trying to make the project more accessible to developers. We've improved the instructions for tracking down the prerequisites and building from source, and we've also added some scripts that automate the build process. This will be an ongoing effort as we make eXe more customizable and the project more sustainable.