Off to eFest...

Three of the eXe team will be descending on Wellington this week for eFest 2007, the big national gathering of teachers, course designers, policy makers, and technologists in the field of e-Learning. We are excited by the reaction we've had to eXe lately and look forward to talking with some of the users face-to-face to get more feedback.

We've released Version 0.95 of eXe today. The big version number jump is intended to suggest that we've implemented most of the key features that we have planned for this part of project. Over the next month or two we plan to refine the framework, polish the user experience, and continue to improve the stability of the editor. (And if you or someone at your institution wants to get involved with eXe development, customization, or translation, now is the ideal time.)

And speaking of the new version, in addition to the usual number of bug fixes and tweaks is a significant new feature: you can now embed images in arbitrary fields of the standard iDevices. This not only improves the authoring flexibility, it allows you to use images within the pedagogical templates the iDevices provide rather than having to treat the images as a special case.

So if you see some seedy guys handing out CDs of the "Pre Release" eXe and showing off text course content on an iPod at eFest, stop by and say "Hi" (or "Why...").

Removing iDevices from eXe

Users can now remove unwanted iDevices from the iDevice pane of their version of eXe by modifying the exe.conf file that comes with eXe. exe.conf is a text file that is used by eXe to configure many of the settings required to run the program. On Windows it can usually be found at C:\\Documents and Settings\YOURUSERNAME\Application Data\exe\exe.conf.


You can edit this file using Notepad on your system.


iDevices are specified by their English name (including spaces, if any). Setting an idevice to 0 or off will cause it not to show up in the iDevice pane. Add an [idevices] section to your exe.conf file and designate what iDevices you wish to remove by adding the name of the iDevice and either a "0" or the word "off" next to the name, like this:


[idevices]
Activity = 0
Case Study = off
Flash with Text = Off
Cloze Activity = On # this one would still appear


Save exe.conf and restart eXe.