Efofex News

On Friday we uploaded FX Manifest V26.02.20 which activates our new course features.

On the startup page you will find the ability to create a new course, a course primer and an example course to play with.

Just remember that creating and using courses is completely optional. We are not trying to change how you do things, we are just providing tools which can make those jobs significantly easier to do.

We hope that you had a great break and have now successfully settled into your new year’s classes!

We were planning a nice, relaxed Christmas break adding to our examples and updating documentation, but that’s not quite how things went down. Instead, a random interaction at a conference meant that we had a whole new feature set to add to FX Manifest. That work is largely done and you will be given access to it soon.

Managing Courses

FX Manifest brought a whole new level of management productivity to the creation of assessments and other resources, particularly with its ability to map all of your marks onto a curriculum. The new feature provides you with the same bump in productivity, but on a whole course level. It also lets you manage all of the documentation for a course in ONE FILE. Every assessment. Every course outline. All in one place. All with the ability to deep-dive into marks allocations and curriculum references on a whole course level. You can, at the push of a button, create a table which shows exactly where every mark is allocated for every curriculum reference. Compliance documentation becomes trivial and largely automatic.

We are in the final stages of checking the new feature for “wrinkles” as well as developing some documentation to make sure that you can get the most out of the new functionality.

And It’s All Optional!

Our toolkit is never prescriptive. You are never forced into doing things OUR way. If you want to keep using our Classic Edition in the same way you have for thirty years – you are more than welcome to. If you want to use the regeneratable question skills you developed with MultiDocs and Word, fantastic – that is all still available (see rebranding below!) If you want to use FX Manifest’s incredibly powerful new features that make manageing assessments and other resources easy, even better – but you don’t have to. Now we are adding another OPTIONAL layer that you can add to your management of courses. We think that it has the ability to save you and your department hundreds of hours of work per year, and our initial feedback from teachers backs this up, but in the end, IT’S ALL UP TO YOU.

Some Rebranding

The release of FX Manifest (and the new course features) means that we have had to do some rebranding to make things as simple as possible to explain.

First up, we are no longer going to talk about MultiDocs. We are NOT removing any of the features. The old MultiDocs branding was all about creating regeneratable questions within Word. This is still possible, but FX Manifest is a much better option. From now on, you will hear us talking about the “regeneratable question technology in FX Manifest”.

Secondly, we will no longer use the .fxmanifest file extension. A manifest is just a list and, in the first versions of FX Manifest we were concentrating on lists of questions in assessments. The release of the course features in FX Manifest means that we are now, also talking about lists of resources and assessments in courses.

The current release now uses .fxresource as a file extension for manifests for assessments and other resources (like worksheets or notes). We also have a new .fxcourse file extension for manifests for courses. All of this is automatic. You will not have to change anything.

Any .fxmanifest files you have created will just load in as normal. Any NEW files will be created with the new file extensions.

Onwards and Upwards

Now that we have largely completed work on courses, we are putting our documentation hat back on. You will see lots of new materials coming out over the next few months as well as further improvements to FX Manifest’s functionality.

FX Manifest is still young, fresh and incredibly exciting. Whenever we show anyone what it can do, we get to hear that excitement build in their comments. Thanks for being part of its development!

As we rapidly move towards full release of FX Manifest, we have done a bit of housekeeping. FX Manifest represents a dramatic increase in the capabilities of what we are offering and means that it is time to reduce the importance of some of our older systems.

Classic Edition Has Been Deprecated

Deprecated is a powerful word. In the world of software it means…

be usable but regarded as obsolete and best avoided, typically because it has been superseded.

and that describes our Classic Edition perfectly. The underlying technology is Windows only and over thirty years old. We will continue to make it available and support it, but its time has past.

Our new systems, particularly FX Manifest, are our future. They are the only way to use our regeneratable question technology.

FX Graph, FX Stat, FX Chem and FX ChemStruct Becoming Less Important

ALL of the features of FX Graph, FX Stat, FX Chem and FX ChemStruct have long been incorporated into FX Draw and FX Equation and we recommend that you restrict your focus to these two, flagship products. Despite this, we have included them in our downloads and given teachers easy access to them, even though they could not be used to create regeneratable materials.

Now that FX Manifest has made creating regeneratable questions easier, these four products have become even less important, so we are making them SLIGHTLY harder to access (in our Manifest edition downloads). We have done this in two ways.

Firstly, you can no longer insert a new FX Graph, FX Stat, FX Chem or FX ChemStruct object from our new toolbar. That is four buttons that we could remove from the toolbar and makes everything much simpler to explain and use.

Secondly, the products are no longer installed by default in our Manifest edition. If you really want them, you have to manually select them.

Documentation & Website Revamp

We are powering our way through rewriting a lot of our documentation and website – removing lots of references to MultiDocs. The nice thing is that FX Manifest is SO much simpler to use when creating regeneratable questions that most of the changes involve REMOVING complicated instructions.

New Prices for a New Year

Unfortunately, we are not immune to the ravages of inflation and 2026 will bring in slightly higher pricing for some locations. We are trying to keep the rise to a minimum and we will honour any quotes we have made.

We have just uploaded a version of FX MathTools that includes the beta version of FX Manifest. To begin with, the beta is ONLY included in the Windows version of FX MathTools. It will appear in FX ScienceTools in the next few days and in the Mac version once we have completed testing.

FX Manifest is new – which means that there are new ideas to come to grips with. BY FAR the best way of getting started is to read the First Time User primer available on the startup screen.

The beta version is feature complete and the file format is fixed. This means that you can use it without worrying about losing any work.

We hope that you will be as excited by this as we are!

It’s been over a year since our last post (well, we DID promise that we would not inundate your inbox!) but that doesn’t mean that we haven’t been busy. In fact, we have been working particularly hard to create a brand new product – FX Manifest.

Take A Look

We have put together an announcement video to give you a quick overview of what FX Manifest can do. You can find it at https://youtu.be/p5gzTPwWll8

All of our products are laser focused on saving you time and FX Manifest is no different. This time, we have focused on providing you with a MUCH better way of using our technologies to produce and manage assessments. For the first time, we have looked at the problems that occur at a departmental level.

FX Manifest takes the entire process of creating and managing assessments and provides tools to ease the administrative burdens this can place on heads of department and experienced teachers. If you use FX Manifest to help you create your assessments you can be far more certain that:

• Marks will add up
• Curriculum coverage is documented
• Solutions will be kept up to date
• Inexperienced teachers will still be able to produce high quality output
• Your Word documents will be well formatted and placed into the department’s “templates”.
• The whole experience will be faster and less error-prone.

MultiDocs Evolved

FX Manifest takes our MultiDocs technologies (which allow you to create questions that can regenerate themselves with new numbers) and makes the whole process simpler. If you have previously looked at our MultiDocs offerings, you will find that the rough edges have been knocked off.

And best of all, FX Manifest will be included into the FX MathTools and FX Science Tools subscriptions at no extra charge. There are no downsides to giving this a go.

FX Manifest has been designed to slot into your existing workflows with minimal impact. All of your old, Word-based materials can be moved into FX Manifest by simply copying and pasting – nothing is left behind. Once you have finished working on your assessment, the final output is a standard Word document, full of editable graphics and equations. The only thing you will notice is that the output is better formatted and you got to the end-line quicker and with less stress.

Coming Soon!

We are incredibly excited about this new product and are planning to get a beta version into our downloads this month – so stay tuned!

The latest version includes two new star tools which allow you to create any star based on a regular polygon.

Once you have drawn a star, select it. You will see an extra control point which allows you to control the ratio between the star’s inside and outside size. This is the same sized star with two different ratios.

When you right click on a star, you can control the number of points.

By controlling the number of sides and the ratio, you can produce a wide variety of different stars.

Or circles divided into sectors – your choice.

If you right click on a circle, you can now subdivide the circle into sectors.

Simply enter the number of sectors you want and push OK.

Probably the biggest difference between our old Classic integration and the new MultiDocs integration is how you edit an existing object. Classic mode was double-clicking, MultiDocs was selecting and pressing the Edit button. It was certainly one of the main stumbling blocks for long-term users.

Now we have managed to implement double-click to edit on the MultiDocs toolbar! Unfortunately, we have not been able to get it to work reliably on Mac machines (there are lots of subtle differences between the Windows version of Word and the Mac version – this just seems to be one of them).

Double-clicking to edit means that the new MultiDocs toolbar is faster to use, offers more features and is (mostly) platform independent. There is even less reason to stick with your old Classic toolbar.

In the latest versions we upgraded the main framework we use to the latest available version to support our new equation to speech functionality. This will have have no impact for most users.

The only affected users are anyone using MacOS Mojave (2018) or Catalina (2019). The new version of the framework is incompatible with these older versions of MacOS.

If you are affected, please consider updating your copy of MacOS to a later version. Alternatively, we have made a version that runs on Mojave and Catalina available on the Obsolete Versions section of our downloads page (http://www.efofex.com/Downloads.php)