Efofex News

You might have noticed that there has been a rash of upgrades and updates coming from Efofex over the last three weeks. It has been an extremely busy time for us, mostly for reasons not of our making.

Unfortunately, the release of FX Draw 6 and FX Graph 6 happened to coincide with the releases of Windows 10, Office 2016 and OS X “El Capitan” which has created a storm of incompatibilities of epic proportions.

The problems started when WIndows 10 prevented us from using a particular location for our Word integration. That prompted a fairly major change in how we integrate into Word. Then we found that the combination of Office 2016 and El Capitan also proved problematic and forced more changes on how our products run. Then we discovered that to get the required changes to run on El Capitan, we needed to change the version of a major 3rd party component of our products. This created a slew of minor incompatibilities as varied as registration files being deleted and some degrees signs showing up as a Chinese character. It also means that we can no longer support OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) for future versions. Over the last three weeks we have logged over 100 changes to the products when we usually would log about 3.

The good news is that the storm seems to have passed.

1. Our products now run smoothly on Windows 10.
2. Word integration problems on Windows machines are largely solved but there still may be some residual issues for customers installing on machines that are not set to English.
3. Our products now work correctly on Office 2016 for Windows and Mac
4. Our products now run on OSX El Capitan and we have provided legacy copies for users of Snow Leopard.
5. We believe that we have completed the transition to the new version of the 3rd party component.

As this is being written, we have no outstanding issues with any products and you can freely install them on your machines.

Our normal policies apply with the new releases of FX Draw 6 and FX Graph 6.

1. Customers using our FX MathPack subscription system can upgrade immediately and the new versions will recognise and honour their subscriptions.
2. Customers who have purchased Perpetual Use licenses for FX Draw 5/ FX Graph 5 (and earlier) can choose to upgrade their copies. Visit our Prices and Ordering Calculator to obtain an upgrade price.
3. Customers who purchased a Perpetual Use License for FX Draw 5 or FX Graph 5 within the last six months will be provided with a free upgrade to the new version. We will be generating and sending these codes within the next week or so. In the short term, you can download and install the new version which will run for thirty days without the new code.

We are very pleased to announce the full public release of FX Draw 6 and FX Graph 6. The new versions are available from our downloads page (http://www.efofex.com/Downloads.php).

We are now moving on to two exciting new initiatives that we will tell you about soon!

We have released FX Equation 5.005.4.

The main improvement in this version is a greatly improved handling of vertically aligned equations.

Previous releases of FX Equation 5 have struggled with aligning equations when there is a mixture of text and equations on a line. For the past six months we have been recommending that, if you wanted to align equations, you did not include any text sections.

V5.005.4 removes this limitation.

The new aligner follows the following rules

1. Any line which STARTS with an equation will have equals signs vertically aligned.
2. Text AFTER an equation will not affect alignment
3. When two equations are separated by text, only the first equation is vertically aligned.
4. Lines which START with text will not take part in the alignment

This seems to be the most intuitive way to handle vertical alignment and is certainly far superior to what earlier versions have been producing.

We have just uploaded the very first FX Draw 6 Beta for both Windows and Mac!

You can download the betas using these links.

FX Draw 6 introduces a number of new features.

• 3D Graphing (the same tool that is included in FX Graph 6)
• 3D Objects
• Dimensions

as well as a host of other improvements and additions.

3D Graphing

Use the function graphing tool but use the new 3D features already discussed in the FX Graph 6 Beta.

3D Objects

Use the new 3D Object tool.

Dimensions

Make sure that you take a look at the What’s New document in the Help menu. All the new features have also been fully documented in the manual.

Note: The Windows version will NOT take over internal links to FX Draw objects in Word documents. You will continue to use FX Draw 5 to edit those documents. You will need to test FX Draw 6 as a stand alone program on Windows machines.

Last Saturday, I was presenting at a conference and a participant asked if FX Graph/FX Draw could restrict the domain of a function BUT show the end points as arrows. In other words, could it show this

instead of this.

The participant knew how to restrict domains using bracket notation but was getting output such as this

At the time, the answer was “No” but I could see her point. The first graph is much better at showing that a standard graph has been moved around the plane. Drawing the full curve over the plane makes the magenta parabola look bigger than the red one (even thought they are the same) simply because more of the curve has been drawn.

So We Fixed It!
The good news is that today, just four days later, we have added the feature to FX Graph 6 and FX Draw 6! We are ALWAYS happy to listen to ideas!

To use the new feature, you write a bracket domain but use braces to indicate that an arrowhead should be used instead of an open or closed circle. In other words, type something like

x2 {-2,2}

You can also mix and match, having arrowheads on one end and an open or closed circle on the other. eg x2 [-2,4}

Note that this new feature will only be available on the new FX Draw 6 and FX Graph 6.