Archive for the ‘Update’ Category

UI Revamp

Saturday, August 16th, 2008

We did a major revamp of the CRIMS UI. We had been working on this for sometime now and we spent time on it to make it more responsive, cleaner and intuitive. Here’s a short description of what has changed.

Popups:

The popups for Edit Tags, Rename, Share and Delete files have been removed. Instead of that we have introduced ‘Edit In Place’ dialog. When you click on these links, a small dialog opens up on the same page to take in the input. Much better than navigating to a different page. Here’s a screen shot of the ‘Share’ operation.

The functionality of removing each share individually has also been added.

The delete file brings up a modal dialog now. The batch operations also show you a modal dialogs instead of popups.

Widgets:

Two new widgets, help and support have been added. They are on all the pages now: Transcripts, Upgrade, Add Machines etc.

Clicking on the help option brings up the modal dialog now. The help text also has been revamped.

Icons:

Icons have been added to the main message bar on each of the pages. For any action they show the result there. If an error occurss during an operation, the text turns red to alert you.

What’s Next:

Autosuggest, color scheme change and more. Stay tuned.

Do let us know what you think of these changes. And thanks for using Call Graph once again.

Client Version 1.0.6.5

Monday, August 4th, 2008

Our weekly update of the recording client is out, version 1.0.6.5. Apart from the several bug fixes, it also contains a new feature: the recording toolbar.

This toolbar appears when a incoming/outgoing Skype call is detected and gives you ability to start/stop/pause the recording and view your call record history. It also displays the current status of recording, whether the recording is ongoing or paused or finished. The pause functionality is new in this release. During the call you can use this button to completely skip parts of the conversation from the recording.

The time when the window opens can be configured from the settings dialog. By default it shows up whenever a call is detected. In case you do not want this then check the box next to ‘Show toolbar when recording’ option.

A corresponding popup menu item also has been added. Click on it so see the toolbar at any point of time.

This is the beginning of a series of changes that we have planned to our client. Next up is ability to keep on recording beyond the call finishes. Eg. in cases when call is dropped or when are doing a redial. All of these will be implemented via this particular toolbar.

If you have some suggestion in mind then do send it across. It helps us in filling in the voids in our software.

More UI changes

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

As mentioned in the last post, the recent change to our UI had increased the clutter on the call record history page. So today we cleared it up. The result is this.

Only the flash player, name of the file and manage options are displayed initially and the details are hidden from the view. Clicking on the ‘Show Details’ reveals the details of the call record. The view can be toggled to show or hide.

Also the current record your cursor is on is highlighted as you move along the page.

Notice the two new items at the top of the page to expand/collapse the details of all the records in one shot. The select all/none has also been moved from the actions widget to here.

This small change has enabled us to do a lot more with the UI. So now you can also set the number of records that are displayed per page. The setting is on the settings page. The default value is 10 but it can be changed to any value you wish.

Another small change was control on the mail notifications that CRIMS sends. It can be turned on or off from the settings page. Here’s a screenshot.

So how does this look? We hope its better than before, but please let us know if it isnt.

The next thing in line is to remove the popup when managing your call records. So stay tuned.

Sorting, Advanced Search and More

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

We released a couple of changes to the UI that we had been working on recently and added a sidebar to the Call Record history page. This sidebar adds a table sorting, batch operations and advanced search functionality. Here’s an overview of these.

Sidebar:

The sidebar looks like the following on the ‘Call Record History’ page.

It has four widgets as of now: space usage monitor, batch operations sort table and advanced search. The space usage shows a graphical representation of the storage space used for your account, as the name suggests.

Batch Operations:

This widget allows you to select multiple call records and do things with them. Right now you can either share them with others or delete all the selected ones. We will add more options to this widget as we go along.

Sorting:

The call records view can be changed using this widget. Four options are available as of now: newest first, oldest first, ascending/descending order of duration and ascending/descending order of file sizes. Once you have sorted them you can use apply some batch file operations on them.

Advanced Search:

Advanced search can be used to filter the call records which match a specific criteria. The four filters available now are duration, filesize, recorded by and uploaded from. So if you want to list all the call records uploaded from a specific machine, then select the uploaded from filter and apply the name of the computer in the pattern part. That will list all the records uploaded from a specific machine. Similarly for recorded by. The patterns in the duration and filesize case can be something like ‘>10 MB’ or ’10 < seconds’ etc.

Once the results are displayed, you can apply either use batch operations or sort them using the sorting widget.

To illustrate the use of these widgets, suppose you want to list all the call records made to a certain person which are greater than 5 mins, oldest first. To do this, you first use simple search to list all the records with that persons name, then apply the the duration filter using the advanced search widget and finally apply the sort with oldest. The resulting page will have all files listed. Now if you want to share all of these at one shot, use the batch operations to select all of them and then select “Share All Selected” from the dropdown. Fill in the email address and call record will be shared!

New Storage Plans:

We also added four new plans: the 8 GB @ $5 p/m, 18 GB @ $10 pm and their yearly counterparts. The payment UI has also been changed and now you can check your status once you have subscribed to it, or cancel the subscription if you want to.

Transcription Rates:

The rates of our transcription service has also been changed to 50 cents per minutes instead of the per line. So for a call record of half an hour, the transcript price will be $15.

What’s Next:

As you would notice, the records table has become a bit cramped up because of the sidebar addition. So in the next iteration we are planning to change that. We are also planning to add a mail notification setting so that you can control how you receive mails from CG CRIMS. Watch this space for more.

Hope these changes are useful. Please do send us your feedback on it.

Client Update: Version 1.0.6.4

Saturday, July 26th, 2008

Several new features in this release. Here’s a brief description of each one of them.

A new menu item for pausing/resuming uploads has been added. It will show up whenever an upload is ongoing. The upload is also automatically paused if another Skype call is detected so as not to hamper the quality of that call. It is automatically resumed when the call finishes. Thanks to David for suggesting this feature.

Some changes were made to the Echo Canceler to increase its sensitivity. If you are experiencing echo in your calls while using Call Graph, then please turn this option on from the ‘Advanced’ tab and check. This option is turned off by default. Beware that this is still an experimental feature and right now it degrades the quality of recording.

We added support for mono encoding of mp3 files in this release. Several of our users had asked for this. This option can be found in the configuration -> recording tab. Its available only for mp3 files though. The reasoning being, if you are recording as wav then you are more interested in preserving the quality and having the caller and the callee’s voices in a separate track does that. If you are doing a podcast then use the wav file encoding and then post edit with Audacity.

In addition we added support for 8 KHz and 24 KHz sampling rates. The default still stays at 16 KHz sampling rate, 96 kbps bit rate. The 8 KHz is mainly to ensure that you have lower file sizes. But note that the quality really goes down at this rate: its analog telephony quality.

Another minor change was to rename the ‘Search’ menu item to ‘History’ to clear up some confusion as to where your call records go after the recording is done! The search functionality is integrated into this call record history dialog. Also, you will see two new options ‘search’ and ‘transcribe’ for each call record. Right now they just redirect you to the CRIMS home page. But watch out, it will lead you directly to you account in the future releases!

This release also contains several bug fixes. So please update now. And please keep sending in your feedback.

Client Update

Saturday, July 19th, 2008

Our weekly update of the Call Graph Skype call recording plugin is out. The version number is 1.0.6.2. You can get the update by right clicking on the Call Graph and choosing ‘Check for updates’ from the popup menu. Here are all the changes which went into this release.

The index file location was moved from the recording directory to the Application Data directory. This change completes the bug fix which was started in the last release. Now the fatal error dude to index file load failure should not happen. If suppose the recording directory is not available when recording is being started (eg. the case when its on a network share) then a recording start failed notification will be shown. One of our users was facing this particular issue and altered us on it. Thanks for doing so.

We added two additional configurations in this release as well, both in the ‘Advanced’ panel of the Configuration dialog.  The first one is for discarding call records which are less than a certain length. Several of our users had asked for this option. The default value is 5 seconds. So all records below 5 seconds will be now discarded and you’ll get a notification saying that the recording was canceled. It can be increased upto 5 minutes (300 seconds).

The second option was for setting the encoding buffer size. The encoding buffer is a temporary store for the voice data before it gets encoded as mp3 or wav. The rate at which this buffer is consumed depends upon several factors: the amount of ram available, the CPU speed, the sample rate of your recording etc. So the hardcoded value of 10 MB sometimes used to be too short in some cases. Which used to manifest itself as breaks in the recorded file. If your records have breaks in them then please increase this value to something like twice or thrice the default value of 10 MB.

Looking forward to your feedback and thanks again for using Call Graph.

Update: We made a stupid typo in this release: ‘Encoing’ instead of ‘Encoding’. Thanks to David for pointing it out. We’ve fixed it in version 1.0.6.3.

Minor UI Changes

Thursday, July 17th, 2008

We made some minor UI changes today to CRIMS: registration process and pagination.

The registration process has been made a bit more standard now. Earlier you had to provide your email and we used to send a link, which used to lead to the profile creation page. Now, you can create a profile and then verify your email later on whenever you wish. You can log in and view your account, but then cannot do much. We need your email address so that the notifications are sent whenever you add machines or upload call records. So for those you would have to verify your email.

The pagination of the Call Record history page was also made more standard. Instead of displaying all the page numbers in at the bottom of the page, which used to be a long list if you had more than 50, 60 records, we now display only around 9 pages. First three, three from the middle or your current page, and three of the last pages.

Another minor change was in the search box. Now its more intuitive and prompts you to enter your search term.

Happy call graphing!

Client Update

Saturday, July 12th, 2008

We just released version 1.0.6.1 version of Call Graph, the free Skype call recording application. To upgrade, please right click on the Call Graph task bar icon and choose ‘Check for updates’. Here’s a brief description of the changes that went into it.

Sometimes during initialization Call Graph used to give an fatal error and abort. It used to happen when the call recording directory was removed. Call Graph stores the indexes in that directory, without which it cannot startup. So if you delete or move this directory, it used to give this fatal error. We have partly fixed this problem by recreating the directory again if it does not exist. We’ll be working more on it in our future releases.

Another change was that upload complete notification is not shown anymore if you have disabled notifications. This was a bug we introduced in the previous release. Thanks to one of our users for pointing it out. :)

The display duration of the sliding window notification has been increased to 10 seconds from 5. Several of our users had mentioned that it disappears too fast. Let us know if this is good enough. If not we’ll increase it further. Or introduce a configuration option for it.

A new feature was also added: Echo Cancellation. Several of our users have complained of a large echo in their calls and recordings when they use the in built mic and speaker (on laptops) or some other device. So we have added an echo canceler in Call Graph. You can read up more about Acoustic Echo Cancellation on Wikipidea. This feature is turned off by default and is accessible from the ‘Advanced’ tab of the configuration dialog.

Its an experimental feature right now. Might work on some machines and not in others. Software echo cancellation is not perfect solution. Its better to have hardware echo cancellation if you have it on your PC. Check the settings on your audio driver for that. It also CPU intensive task and and an additional processing step. Depending upon your PC configuration you might get varied results. We’ll keep on testing and improving it in future releases.

We’d suggest that you use a headset for high quality recordings. It keeps the noise down to the minimum and produces very good results.

Please update your client and keep the feedback coming.