Tuesday, October 28, 2003

Resellers now working!

I asked share-it about my needs and they had a brilliant solution for this! All users registered at share-it will get more information in a few days on how to become a reseller. If you are a user and got the program any other way please send me an e-mail and I will get back to you.

Yesterday the "Update tires from database" button was implemented and also the possibility to export selected sessions from the "Sessions - Completed" tab. This tab has a lot more functionality in v3.0 than before, a screenshot is coming up soon! I also made some improvements in the manual import of laptimes, in v3.0 you can import from UltraLap and PI software too.

Monday, October 27, 2003

Anyone interested in knowing about my long-term ideas concerning Tracktimer?

Sharing setup information
In the future when you buy a racebike/car/kart you will also get a backup of that users Tracktimer data. You don't own Tracktimer yet but by using the trial version you can look and use the data you just like you can with the full version apart from that you cannot save anything (except track data details).
Then later if you decide that you want to continue using Tracktimer you simply buy it.

All old customers are potential resellers
Now comes the next step, all former customers can act like resellers! (Provided that share-it agrees on it, nothing ready yet). By signing up as an author on share-it you will get an author ID and by using that ID in the link to the order pages all orders will be "marked" with your ID and you will automatically receive a 20% (not decided the exact percentage yet) provision that also is payed out to you automatically every month or when you reach a certain sum. Since most of my users are on a level of racing where a web site is more or less necessary this will be very easy to implement, just add a few links and it's done.

Svensk Bilprovning AB
The "Tracktimermobile" (or chaosmobile as I prefer to call it) were thoroughly "dissected" today by the Swedish "car testing facility", something we have to do each year. All went well, new brake pads has to be installed though...

Here are some pictures of the car in case anyone is curious... :-)

Thursday, October 23, 2003

So, what's up with Tracktimer?

First of all I have been working hard to make it translatable by moving all static texts to resource strings. I have tried different translation tools and have decided to use dxgettext which works just great and is also free of charge.

I have also tried to remove a lot of the windows controls in the program to make it use less system resources, very important if you are running an OS older than Windows NT4.0. Also most input fields now have "memory" so you can choose from previously entered values in a "click-list".

The new basic versions are also working for all vehicle types. You can only have one setup for each track in these versions but that will hopefully be good enough for many users.

I have also added a very powerful tire database that more or less automatically updates your tires with number of laps, tracks, drivers and so on. Some more work remains here, like an "Update from database" button to get the latest mileage and circumference values to a new tire setup. This works if you reload the tire setup but I will also make a button to fix it faster.