Efofex News

The FX Online Beta has been out for three weeks and we have just uploaded a version that adds three new features. FX Online is our new, mathematical web publishing system.

Add Audio To a Page

You can now add an audio file to any page you create. You can either use an existing file or record your own, dulcet tones to describe the concept on the page.

Arrows

We have also added a new, arrow tool that permits you to add quick arrows to your diagrams.

Example

You can see both of these new tools in action in the Introduction To FX Online example web lesson.

Web Preview

We have also added an option to preview how the page will appear in a web browser.

Using , For Decimal Points

The latest version also fixes an issue where a number of features where not working when used in locations which use , as the decimal point.

Introducing FX Online!

It is with nervous excitement that we are announcing the inclusion of a totally new tool into FX Draw Tools. Introducing FX Online!

FX Online is a turbo-charged version of FX Draw that is solely focused on the design, uploading and hosting of mathematically aware web lesson sets. FX Online brings the power and familiarity of FX Draw to web-based materials. Here’s an example of a web page from an FX Online lesson set where I have displayed half of the solution.

Anything you can draw in FX Draw, you can now publish to the web with FX Online. FX Online is, however, much more than FX Draw. We have added interactive, web-based features that allow you to create more dynamic web experiences – with much more to come.

Importantly, you don’t need to be a web design expert or understand the vagaries of the Internet. If you have used FX Draw in the past, you are already most of the way to designing and hosting your first lesson set.

FX Online will be included at no extra charge in your FX Draw Tools subscription. There are a few small caveats but for most people, FX Online is a bonus.

Samples

Take a look at this small collection of web lesson sets that we have designed to demonstrate some of the power of the new tool. All of these have been created in FX Online and uploaded to the web at the push of a button. They will give you a quick introduction to some of FX Online’s capabilities.

Introduction to FX Online

Spiralling Triangles

Introduction to Trigonometry

Congruent Halves

The final two lesson sets show how you can create two (or three) different versions of the same material with or without solutions – all from the one file.

Year 10 Test with Solutions

Year 10 Test without Solutions

So Why Are We Nervous?

We are releasing the beta version FX Online earlier than we would really like as it is so applicable to teachers trying to teach students remotely. Had the current crisis not occurred we probably would be announcing this in a few months.

What’s missing is comprehensive training materials, speed enhancements, final testing and some of the nifty new features we have planned. We have decided that, at the moment, a tool that does most of what we intended is better than no tool at all.

What you can expect is a flurry of new materials and updates over the next few months. We have hundreds of things planned for FX Online that will enhance its already huge set of capabilities.

What we can promise is that anything you create now, will be editable in newer versions. As we add new features, you will be able to go back and make your lesson sets even better.

Download Now

The FX Online beta has been added to the latest download. Visit out Downloads Page and start exploring now!

FX Draw allows you to scale selected figures by moving the scale handle.

The latest version of FX Draw allows you to create scaled or translated copies of a figure. To access this feature RIGHT-CLICK on the scale handle.

FX Draw allows you to rotate selected figures by moving the rotate handle.

The latest version of FX Draw allows you to create rotated copies of a figure. To access this feature RIGHT-CLICK on the rotate handle.

Enter the number of copies you want to create and how much to rotate between copies. Then press OK. FX Draw will create the copies, rotate them (centred around the centre of rotation you set) and add them to your canvas.

The latest release of FX Draw adds a movable centre of rotation/scaling.

Previous versions of FX Draw could rotate and scale figures but used a fixed centre of rotation/scaling. The latest release allows you to move the centre to suit your needs.

We have added a new feature to FX Stat and the statistics tool in FX Draw that makes it easier to work with bivariate data.

If you select two columns of data in FX Stat and right click, you will be offered a new option: Copy As Points

If you select Copy as Points, the data will be placed onto your clipboard as a list of ordered pairs (points) that can then be pasted into Word or any other container application.

(31,47.7) (27.8,37.2) (47.5,56.2) (48.2,58.9) (47.1,55.1) (50.1,61.8) (49.7,58.1) (47.4,62.7) (43.4,50) (45.1,51.9)

As noted in our news article from November 2019, Mac OSX Catalina requires that downloaded programs are “notarised” by Apple before they can be run without security notifications. Efofex now provides notarised applications in our downloads so our products should be easily accessed on the new MacOS. Mac users should download the new versions as soon as practical.

We believe that we have managed to organise notarisation our products without breaking compatibility for users using older Macs.

If you are one of the teachers being impacted by the OneNote issue we discussed in May, we have some good news for you from Microsoft.

After a lot of pressure from customers who prefer the OneNote desktop interface, Microsoft have decided to continue developing and supporting the desktop version of OneNote.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365-Blog/Your-OneNote/ba-p/954922

This means that you will very quickly be able to approach your IT staff and ask that the desktop version of OneNote be reinstalled on your computer.

While we have still not been able to get Microsoft to address the pasting issue in the app version of OneNote (despite many approaches), this news will permit teachers to go back to the version that they overwhelmingly prefer (and not just because of our products!).

Just in case you do not know the difference between the two versions, the desktop version has tabs across the top and a list of pages in the current tab down the side.

The app version, which is very similar to the online, web-based version, has the “tabs” and pages on the left.

Microsoft has tried to standardize on the app version but has experienced significant push-back from customers who dislike the new user interface for lots of varied reasons. This blog post means that Microsoft is listening to customers!

The latest version of Mac OSX, Catalina, introduces a new round of security settings which are causing issues for our products. Downloaded apps now need to be officially “notarized” by Apple before they can run on your computer.

At the moment our products are not notarized, although they are digitally signed to ensure that they have come from a known Apple certified developer.

We are currently working on ways of getting our products notarized but are experiencing some difficulties as we deliberately produce our software using some older technologies. We do this to allow teachers to use our products on old versions of Mac OSX. At the moment we are caught in a bind between supporting teachers using old computers (of which there are many) and supporting teachers using the latest Macs (of which there are comparatively few).

You can, if you wish, use our current versions on Catalina but it requires some extra steps to authorize the products, as well as ignoring some overly-dramatic messages from Apple. The full (Apple produced) instructions to do this are here.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202491

We will continue working on producing a version that supports all of our many users.

We have just uploaded new versions of all of our products which have much better SVG support. SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) files are a vector based graphics file which allows for high resolution output regardless of how far you zoom in.

While our products have long been able to save files in SVG format, they have not previously been able to crop the page to your graphic. This meant that SVG files were often a small graphic at the top left of a blank page. The latest versions of our products fix this issue and now provide SVG files that are cropped to your graphic. Just choose File Save As SVG from the menus.

Windows Users Get More

If you use Windows and you do not normally send files to Mac users, you can turn on a new option that allows you to paste SVG files directly in to your Word documents.

Go to the Tools Menu and choose Preferences. Turn on “Add SVG to Clipboard”. Once this is done, whenever you click on the green check mark, the product will add an SVG version of the graphic to the clipboard. Word will use this preferentially.

There are two reasons to use SVG graphics.

• Higher quality output
• Transparent graphics

Note that SVG graphics will NOT be used if you are using the toolbar to insert a graphic, you will only get SVG graphics if you use our newer, copy and paste option.

Unfortunately, the Mac version of Word does not seem to “play nice” with SVG graphics so we have not turned this feature on by default. If, however, you tend to exclusively use Windows computers and our new, copy and paste modern-mode system, SVG graphics will produce a noticeable improvement to your graphics.