Quick Quest - Equation and Symbols Support

Quick Quest Compact Edition Beta is out for initial evaluation. I am happy that people started using it and coming up with suggestions and queries. What I am hearing more is about Equation Editor Feature. I thought of taking a crack on it in this post.

Quick Quest supports entering Mathematical equations and Science Symbols. If you go to question entry page and in question or answer entry box, if you right click and navigate to “Insert” in pop-up menu, you will see “Equation” option. On your selection of this will insert a template in question or answer entry box, which you have to double click to enable the equation editor. Sometimes even after your double clicks it does nothing and you may feel weird. The reason for this behavior is Microsoft Office with Equation Editor is not installed on your machine.

To enable this feature you are required to install Microsoft Office (any version, 97/2000/XP/2003/2007). Please follow the step by step instructions given by Microsoft to install Equation Editor comes with Microsoft Office Suite.
Once you are done with the equation editor installation, you can now start Quick Quest and it should allow you to enter Equations and symbols.

‘Quick Quest’ takes help of Microsoft Equation Editor Utility and there are couples of reasons for this addiction. I found Microsoft Equation Editor is appealing and very easy to use. Also looking at the MS Office software domination in offices and users expertise, it will be easy for Quick Quest user to enter equations and symbols with no extra training.

And one more thing, through out this post, I assumed you have legal copy of Microsoft Office with you. :)

Quick Quest CE - Coming Soon

I am excited about Quick Quest: Compact Edition. The preview release of the next version of the Quick Quest is getting ready. www.SrushtiSoft.com is updated with new Quick Quest Ad Page. The next version of Quick Quest will be ‘the generic software for automation of question paper generation processes’. Hence the tag, “Single software for all education institutes in this world!”

What do you think?

An attempt to gather your opinion about SrushtiSoft.com through a shortest survey setup hosted here. I bet it will not take more than 30 seconds, please help us improving our site.

Quick Quest - The Old and The New

Nothing is completely decided and I am trying out some new UI design for Quick Quest Compact Edition. I thought of posting old (Screen Shot 1) and new (Screen Shot 2) Quick Quest screens which gives you glimpse of application windows as well as the comparison.

Below images are demonstrating same functional screens in Quick Quest (old & new) and you can see the effort towards making user experience better in new edition. In old Quick Quest, Question paper pattern creation screens required some training and I believe in the new edition, need for training is little reduced.

Your comments and thoughts are very much valuable and appreciated if you get little time to express those here.

Screen Shot 1 (Old Quick Quest)

Screen Shot 2 (New Quick Quest)

Quick Quest CE: An Update

As per the previous post on Quick Quest, by this time Quick Quest – Compact Edition should have been released. I was driven by my vision of SrushtiSoft products for not to strictly follow up on the planned dates (at least for now). During the revisit of Quick Quest, I realized that many aspects need fresh thoughts and entirely a new approach to deal Quick Quest users need. I self initiated Quick Quest – Compact Edition assignment with a thought of ‘as is’ migration of Visual Basic 6.0 code base to Visual Basic.Net taking the help of migration wizard offered by Microsoft Dot Net IDE. I am sure that this could have worked quickly and would not have introduced any delays in the release of Quick Quest – Compact Edition. However my emphasis is more on delivering more stable and scalable product and never mind if I miss planned schedules. As a result, I am now having a brand new Quick Quest built from scratch which is highly scalable, stable and more user friendly than before.

Quick Quest can be broadly viewed through 3 functional parts.
1. Institution/Study setup
2. Question Bank creation and management
3. Question Paper Generation.

Currently I have finished 1 and 2 function areas. Functional part 3 is under construction. Quick Quest – Professional was built when I was undergoing my graduation and I had not taken much care on the architecture front. I am hoping new version has many neat things are in place.

Extending Prayog 2007

Our new customer of Prayog is expecting enhancements in reporting. Currently Prayog generates 'black and white' output; making it colorful is the requested improvement. As per our new customer feedback, we understand that coloring some of the report lines help getting doctor’s attention and achieve ‘non-verbal’ communication. We have seen instance where colors talk’s more than 'good looking' aspects and Prayog is going to use that factor effectively in its next enhancement release.
The team Prayog is now working on providing options for user to create colored reports. Our prototype output was quite impressive and we will soon release the updated version of Prayog.

Quick Quest - Compact Edition

If you check at SrushtiSoft, We have not provided trial/evaluation version of QuickQuest for download due to its complicated network installation process which is out of our scope to include in setup package since it requires little geeky manual intervention. We are now working on “Compact Edition” which can easily run on a single computer/laptop for a single user.

We see quite good opportunities for Compact Edition as this best suites personal user who can use this for their kid’s studies, private institutes and schools. The Compact Edition will be built using Microsoft’s latest Dot Net technology.

The new polished Compact Edition will be out by May 2008.