[OT]DryLab Plus v5.81 announcement

[revolution at duncansoftware.on-rev.com]

Thanks to the kind folks who responded to my announcement. I had to do some debating with myself before responding to this off topic announcement with more off topic verbal diarrhea but there may be something instructional for someone here. I hope.

Colin - You are correct about the order. I didn't intend it to be a chronology.

Geoff and Tom here is a short version of the trip through development land. Other listers might want to scroll past this email.

This is the story of how I accidentally became a software developer. I was teaching and there was money to buy software. The money was spent and the software we received was truly awful. After my teaching partner got tired of hearing me say that I could create better software than this crap he challenged me to do it. I had learned to program on an IBM System 360 Mainframe (back in the days of key punch cards) while studying engineering at the University of Waterloo. Fortran and assembler for any one out there with grey hair.

I started creating the program in DOS before discovering Windows 3.1 and ToolBook. It took me 3 months to create the basic program with the first animal. I look back now and wonder how I did it in such a short time, although, it was during summer break. The original ToolBook version of the DryLab Plus was ahead of its time.  The feature that might most interest fellow programmers was that it was completely editable by a teacher. They could change any of the material including pictures, organ outlines, videos, questions, delete pages (cards) add pages, edit pages ... everything. And then they could save their changes as a new executable program. They could not wander from the program paradigm however. It was a great selling feature but the reality was that very few teachers wanted to be developers although they thought they did at the time of purchase. As developers we make this stuff look easy. It isn't.

I developed a relationship with a distributor and they kept insisting that it needed to run on Macs. Authorware appeared on the surface as the solution or was it mTropolis (I had agreed to write a book for mTropolis when it was sold out from under everyone) or was it Oracle Media Objects (Colin forgive me if I screw up the order). They were all used to produce products but lack of "easily" utilized power was their main failing. The cross platform version was developed but didn't offer many of the features that the original version did. It didn't sell and we had to do too many exchanges with teachers who thought they were getting the editable version.

Then we were on to a Director/Flash version which ran in a browser. That solved the need for it to be cross platform and we were far enough away from the original editable version that it was no longer a problem. Teachers really liked the email reporting feature in this program. So the teachers were happy but our support calls went through the roof. Every other time that shockwave was updated our software would have problems.

A lot of soul searching went into the decision to do the latest rewrite in Livecode. Not because of Livecode but because of the business concern of whether it would pay for the development time and also I am long retired from teaching and if it wasn't for a love of coding I wouldn't be doing this in retirement.

And here we are today with a new version up to the task of running on modern computers.

An interesting note concerning the original development. We decided that the life expectancy of the original ToolBook version was 2 years. We were off by a bit. The last copy of the ToolBook version sold last year, after 19 years, for $129 USD to run on Win XP. The new version is listed at $20 USD. The only missing features in the new version are student tracking and the editable feature. I neglected to mention that the original version tracked every mouse click, page viewed, question answered etc. for every student.

There is of course a great deal more to the thinking that directs the decisions of programmers and hopefully I have said just enough that you won't ask for more details. There were some really bad decisions made and some really good ones.

Stu

>Duncan Software announces the immediate availability of the DryLab Plus v5.81.
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>The DryLab Plus is educational software entailing a thorough dissection simulation including testing and reporting. There are 6 individual >programs in the series including the Fetal Pig, Frog, Rat, Perch, Crayfish, and Earthworm. If you know a science teacher or home schoolers >please pass this info along to them.
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>Please please download the FREE demo and let us know of any bugs that you find. There is a button in the program for reporting bugs via blind >email. If you are interested in the CGI email script just let us know. A version of this script is used to report the student's marks without popping >up their email program which would allow them to alter the content.
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>2014 is the 20th anniversary of the development of this software in 1994 for Windows 3.1 using ToolBook. It was almost a DOS program but we >decided at the last minute to go "modern" and develop for Windows 3.1. Over the intervening years it has wandered through Authorware, >Director, Flash, mTropolis, Oracle Media Objects, et al to finally and "happily" arrive at Livecode. This was a complete rewrite starting from >scratch and now the software runs on Mac OSX and Windows.
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>Our web site is at:
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>http://www.duncansoftware.com
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>However you can get a direct download of the free demo by going to:
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>http://www.duncansoftware.com/demo581.html
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>The demo contains selected material from each of the 6 programs in the series.
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>A companion program is also available, the DryLab 3D/2D. As expected this program contains stunning 3D pictures and only requires red/blue >3D glasses. All the material is also available in 2D format for those not able to view 3D. This series of 11 programs was also created in >Livecode. The direct link to the demo is:
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>http://www.duncansoftware.com/demo3d.html
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>Please do not clog up the list with bug reports on these titles. You can send them directly to us at
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>customerservice at duncansoftware.com
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>Of course you need to replace " at " with the @ symbol. If there are any reports that we think would be of interest to the list we will report them.
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>If you are still reading we truly thank you for your interest and thanks to RunRev for allowing the occasional product announcement.