Views from Verbatrix

Safety First

You have just handed out a wordsearch grid to the class. You casually glance at it and two letters grab your attention - 'F', 'U'. Your eyes are drawn magnetically to the next letter. Oh no! 'F', 'U', 'C'.

Panic turns to relief - 'F', 'U', 'C', 'H', 'S', 'I', 'A'. A word has been accidentallly created by the grid generation, but it is 'Fuchsia'. Things could have been so much worse ...

GridForge Studio already contained a forbidden words feature in the configuration tab, where users can upload their own bespoke list of words to check for. But in version 1.1 we have added a fail-safe, a second line of defence against accidental misshaps when the empty grid cells are filled. No matter what the banned words check setting is, a sweep for the built in list of forbidden words is always carried out. So if the user has forgotten to enable the bespoke check in the configuration their creations will still be scanned for some of the most offensive words. There is a password protected override to this in the setup admin area so if the user really wants to they can ignore this check, but we strongly recommend, for education users in particular, that this function is left switched on.

If any forbidden words are detected then they are highlighted on the preview grid, and there are options to manually or automatically edit to substitute letters to remove these artefacts.

So fear not, and breathe easy, GridForge Studio has got your back!

And it gets worse!

Just as I thought we were on target to release as scheduled, I found out that a couple of coders had not been using the locale system which makes GridForge Studio fully international ready. The choices were to go ahead and release anyway, or sort things out properly now and release the corrected version later. Of course that is not really a choice. We have had to delay the launch again. I have put it back almost a week, but I am quite confident that we will get things fixed earlier than that, so there is every chance that version 1.1 will be available before the actual official launch date, for those of you that cannot wait.

It Gets Better!

Well, the colour by number generator turned out to be as amazing as I could possibly have imagined. But then I started doing some last minute testing of the Maths Worksheet generator. And I started getting ideas. And I put the ideas to one of our developers. And things have just snowballed. And believe me the short extra delay to the release of GridForge Studio version 1.1.0 will be well worth it. I can confidently say that no other worksheet generator has anything like the features we now have. All will soon be revealed, the release is imminent, but I will add some sneak preview images here very soon.

Balancing Act

Well, I want to get the GridForge Studio update released as soon as possible. But sometimes things just have to wait. What we are working on is something special, and the previews I am seeing are incredibly impressive. What is coming will be a colour by number creator the likes of which has never been seen before! I will add some sneak preview images here later.

Number Problems

This week has been a very frustrating one. I have had my coders working on finishing off what I am confident will be the best colour by number generator in the world. This is to be the final component to be added to the new release of GridForge Studio, and like every other component I want it to be as high a quality as possible, and if at all possible to go beyond anything else that is currently available. I knew we almost had it, we were so close. But it wasn't right. Every time I was given the component, I ended up rejecting it with the same plea - it is so close but not quite right. Eventually, a few days ago I reaised that the big problem we were hitting was actually insurmountable. If the processed picture includes a lot of detail then there will always be the need for a lot of colour index numbers because there will be lots of colourable regions. And because the regions are small there is not enough room to render a number label big enough to read comfortably. So clearly it was time for a pragmatic approach.

I decided we had to use a separate key whenever we use detailed areas when processing a picture. At least that wil be the recommended approach, as always GridForge Studio will offer lots of options, so the user is not stuck with what I decide. And not just a separate key but separate keys - we have included the ability to produce dedicated keys for the detailed areas so that the main key is not overwhelmed with information. What I will say is that this approach is working really well, and I am confident when I say that we now have the best, most powerful and most flexible colour by number or painting by number creator in existence. 

What do I mean when I say ' whenever we use detailed areas when processing a picture'? Well, we have developed a feature in which a simple mask can very quickly be applied to a source image to denote areas that are 'detailed', with the rest being treated as the background. And the detailed areas can have different processing settings than the background. So for example in a photograph of a person standing in front of the Sphinx, the person's face can be marked as the detail area, and the image can be processed so that the face comes out recognisable even though the Sphinx dominates the actual photograph. When we first got this feature working it was an absolute game changer in terms of creating high quality output without a ridiculous number of fiddly, tiny regions. This is just one unique feature that we have, there are many more, and they will very soon be unveiled as the release of GridForge Studio version 1.1 is imminent, hopefully in the next week. Make sure you do not miss out on our unrepeatable launch offers.

  1. Setbacks and Leaps Forward

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