eXe 1.0

Well eXe 1.0 has ticked over with a dignified click. We are happy to announce that 1.0 has been unleashed in a low key sort of way. The Auckland based team will celebrate over a glass or two of good Kiwi wine tonight with Wayne who serendipitously is arriving back in Auckland this evening. We'll have a virtual glass with our Gisborne based crew, in fact if Brent brings his N800 we might even video call you in on celebrations tonight.

We have many people to thank for their contributions, first and foremost our developers without whom none of this would have been possible, David, Wen Chen Hol, Brent, Jenny, Matthew, Jim and Remo. These guys were dedicated to the cause even when sometimes it wasn't that clear what the cause was. You guys rock! We'd also like to acknowledge Jamie and Jonathan for the graphic work they contributed, all those who contributed to the language translations namely Bárd András, Arek Felinczak, Andres Mellik, Abbas Mousavi, Fredrik Paulsson, Ralf Hilgenstock, Sigurður Fjalar Jónsson, John Kostaras, Tania Oxenham, Sipho Msimango, L. Vandijck, Carla Impagliazzo, Jose Cifuentes Riquelme. Thanks also to our global community of users, testers, and enthusiasts who have encouraged us to continue our work here. Thanks to our funders and sponsors, The Tertiary Education Commission, Tairawhiti Polytechnic, Auckland University of Technology and The University of Auckland.

Thanks to Sandy for your leadership over the past year, we've probably left you a little grayer and wearier but as an adventure junkie we hope the ride has been worthwhile. Finally, Wayne, who believed that there was a real need for this software and that we could do it.

There are probably many people who have contributed to this release that I haven't mentioned by name here and I do apologise but please know we are very grateful for your contributions.

One More Thing

There is a lot of flexibility hiding behind the link button in eXe fields. You highlight some text that will become a link, then click the link button in the toolbar and enter the destination URL (complete with http://) in the popup box. The text becomes a standard hypertext link to the destination. A rather standard feature and very convenient for linking to resources elsewhere on the web. But we'd like to show you One More Thing... eXe 0.99.

You'll notice that the link popup has a file browser icon to the right of the URL field... just like the image, media, and math popups. Use the file browser to select a file and eXe will include the file in your package so that it can be accessed by clicking the link text. This brings the flexibility to include "attachments" in any eXe field with the rich text editor. There is no longer a need to use a special Attachment iDevice. Attachment handling now parallels that of images and media. We think this consistency further improves the eXe ease of use.

Media Flexibility

One aspect of eXe that we have been eager to improve is how images, audio, and video can be included within a course. R3m0 Williams has been hard at work over the past few releases to improve our rich text editor. When authoring each field of nearly every iDevice you will now see buttons for inserting images, media, and mathematics.(1) This gives you the flexibility to include media wherever it is appropriate, including things like inserting multiple video clips in one activity or putting an image in the feedback. There is no longer any need for special case iDevices that exist only for holding an image or certain type of media.

For example, if you click on the leftmost of the highlighted buttons you are shown a dialog box for selecting the image to embed and the properties of that image. Click on the file browser icon and you can pick an image (JPEG, PNG, GIF) from your local hard disk to be inserted in the field. The dialog box also allows you to set the description (the ALT tag of the image for accessibility) and the title (which many browsers display when hovering the mouse over the image). If you want finer control over image and text layout within the field, you can embed items inside of table cells using the rich text editor.

Old eXe packages that use the Image with Text iDevice are automatically updated to use the Free Text iDevice with the image embedded in it. You can edit that iDevice to change its layout (or even add more images). We plan to deprecate the other media-specific iDevices like Flash Movie, Flash with Text, MP3, and Maths since you can now include all of their features and more within the standard iDevices.


(1) The image button was added in eXe 0.95, the media button in eXe 0.97, and the mathematics button will appear in eXe 0.98 which you can get a sneak preview of by helping to test our nightly builds. Your feedback in our forums is most welcome.

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.