11031. Discussions with the Printwiser client (GPP) that started right after their training last month continued, on upgrading their version from 8.1 to the latest 10.5. This went on the rest of the month and after they requested for a presentation of the new version, three videos were created in preparation. The videos were posted on YouTube, however could be downloaded from here as a zip of 3 mp4 files.

11053. Discussions with another Printwiser client (AP) on their own upgrading of a feature also continued. This went on the rest of the month as well. We also took about 30 minutes to resolve a query by month issue on the Phone Call List of MoneyBooks Data Manager, rebuilding the application.

11101. In MoneyBooks Employees module we had to resolve a database trigger error that prevented the addition of a new employee. As the operation was formerly working the issue was the result of later changes to the database structure. The update was completed the next day.

11171. We implemented the next Gerian Assistant 1.71 revision of the HIDDEN Form, to speed up things for rare situations when the Alt key did not work. Now when a clue is typed and the second clue is not given, it will no longer tab to the other three clue blanks, going straight to the input after the clues, that used to require Alt+A. Also the word being correct (Yes or No) is now saved and reused. So if the answer word is correct the default that would show next time would be Yes instead of No all the time. The revisions were completed the next day.

11193. Preparation for the Printwiser (Estimating) features videos began. The videos were to be recorded using CamStudio 2.7, and a Windows 7 installation of this application was done, which required automatically downloading and installing MS Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable package that it needed to work. Configuring CamStudio included adjusting the frame capture and playback values to minimize generated recording file sizes, and also setting the keyboard shortcuts for recording start/pause and stop.

11226. The third recording of the Printwiser features video was made that was good enough for uploading. It was on the Flexible Estimate Spreadsheet feature. The recording of 20 minutes 28 seconds was saved by CamStudio as an avi file of 154 MB. After it was uploaded to one of our websites, a user that downloaded it reported that the file only played audio without images, though later was played properly by an AVI player application that he downloaded. On attempt to copy the avi to phones we were warned it would not play in an Android phone, while it got converted to a wmv file before being copied to a Windows Phone, which then played fine.

11230. We uploaded the Flexible Estimate Spreadsheet feature video to YouTube. The next day, the next video on the Quote Writer feature, was created and uploaded to YouTube. The video was 20 minutes and 15 seconds long with avi file size of 146.5 MB.

11252. While preparing for the next Printwiser features video, on the Capital/Energy Estimate Summary Format, we discovered an issue with the development database that took over 30 minutes to resolve. The database error came up on attempt to generate the estimate summary working sheet in Capital/Energy format. It was puzzling because this report had long been tested okay last year. Eventually it turned out we made a change later to an SQL procedure used for the report when we implemented another report later, and the development database didn’t get updated successfully at the time. The solution was simply to load the latest version of the SQL procedure into it. The video was completed the next day and uploaded to YouTube. It was 18 minutes and 23 seconds long with avi file size of 152 MB.

We created the mp4 version of the Flexible Estimate Spreadsheet video in 24 minutes using Winxvideo AI, and even though we got the same warning it might not play in the Android phone when we wanted to copy it using Windows Explorer, it did play. The mp4 file was much smaller at 34 MB so obviously some 78% compression was done.

11274. We did the conversion with Winxvideo of the avi for Quote Writer feature to mp4, in about 26 minutes resulting in 30 MB only. The following day, we tried to use VLC to convert the last avi to MP4 but none of the 3 different formats we tried—Video for YouTube SD; Video - H.264 + MP3 (MP4); Video for MPEG4 720p TV/device—produced something that played well in Windows Media Player and VLC itself. Later we used Winxvideo for the conversion, supplying metadata as well (title, author, comments) and the resulting file was 30 MB and was generated in 21 minutes. We made a zip containing the 3 MP4 videos and a playlist file, and uploaded it to our server. With these smaller MP4 files playing locally, we would not have to rely on internet connection on the features presentation day at the client’s office.

11300. We drafted the Optional Printwiser (Estimating) Features page for our website, including links for the three videos, then uploaded it to the server.