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The bi weekly update of Call Graph client is out. The recording module has been revamped, sharing, transcribing is inbuilt to the UI, uploading limits are gone and several bug fixes. Here’s a detailed description of the changes.

Recording/Encoding:

Several changes were made to the core recording and encoding module. There will be marked improvement in the quality of the recordings with this version. The encoding is faster, finishes as soon as the call ends. The delay/out of sync issues with SkyepIn and SkypeOut should also be gone. The Echo Cancellation has been improved too. All this as a result of moving from Wave I/O to DirectSound!

Uploading:

The process of uploading the call records to your account in at Call Graph has been changed. Now you do not need to approve the machine after adding it. That step is gone. Also you can upload records of any size now: the 100 MB limit is also gone.

Record Listing:

You can specify the number of records to be show now, either 10 (default), 50 or 100. This option is available on the header, just above the record listing. The Select All/None options have been moved above the checkboxes to the left. The Expand All/None is to the right now.

Sharing:

Sharing has been built into the client UI now. With this option, you can send the record to an email address directly. The record will be uploaded to our web service and a mail will be sent to your contact with details on how to access it. You will need to be registered with our web service for this.

Transcribe:

The transcribe link submits the record for screening. Once the screeing process is done, you can order transcripts of it from your account on Call Graph. Registration with our web serivce is require for this too.

Local Folder:

A new button has been introduced in the sidebar which opens the local folder where the call records are stored. You can directly access your files from there.

Whats Next:

More accurate echo cancellation, ability to record notes, more configuration options. Stay tuned.

Apart for the above, there are several bug fixes in this release as well. Please update now.

Continuing with the UI changes we had started with our client, we have recently released the first batch of UI changes for our web service. In brief, the colors have changed, the the menu has been rearranged, the sidebars have been tweaked and the pages have been optimized to load faster.

Color Combination:

We have completely done away with the dark green background. It has been replaced with a white now. The main area of every page has a white background while the menu and sidebars are light green. The text is now black on all the pages.

Menu Changes:

The Call Record History page has been renamed to ‘Uploaded Records’. The support page has been removed. We have introduced help widgets on the sidebar to replace the functionality.

Uploaded Records:

This page lists all the records that have been uploaded from the Call Graph client. The listing is now identical to the one in the Client UI. The flash player has been replaced with a button which in turn launches the flash player when its clicked. A progress bar is now displayed before the flash player appears which makes the play function instant. Earlier there used to be a delay between the time when the play button was clicked and the file started playing.

The shared records listing has also been changed in a similar way.

Sidebar:

The sidebar also has undergone a revamp. On the uploaded records and shared records page, the Order By, Search and Filter options have been grouped into a single box. This is to indicate that these options can be combined with each other while trying to locate a particular record. The search earlier used to be at the top of the page.

Whats Next:

Tighter integration with the Client UI, sharing, transcribing directly from the client etc. Stay tuned.

Let us kwow that you think of the new color combination and the changes. Things should be much faster and responsive than earlier now.

This update fixes an issue with our last update 1.1.0.0 where the migration to Sqlite DB used to fail in cases where the call record name had Unicode characters in its name and it used to give an Initialization Failed error. With this update, the migration should go through smoothly.

This is a major update of the client. The UI has been completely revamped and moved to the browser. Clicking on the history menu item or the configuration menu item now opens the default browser window. It adds quite a lot of options on searching/sorting/filtering of the call records. Here are few screenshots of it.

The recordings page shows all the records found on the local machine in the main area. Upto 10 records can be listed at a time and pages are shown for navigation. Clicking on the play button launches an inbuilt flash player which plays back the file. Clicking on the show details link reveals all the metadata of the call records (eg. date recorded, size, duration etc.). The rename and edit tags link can be used to edit the details. The upload link queues the files for upload (only if your client is associated). The delete link removes the record from your machine.

The sidebar shows the options for batch file operations, searching, sorting and filtering. Now multiple records can be selected at a time and either deleted or queued for upload. The records can also be sorted in ascending/descending order of time, size and duration. The default is newest. The search dialog can be used to locate a record by name or tags. The filter can be used to narrow down the listing by a specific criteria (the possible ones are duration, size, uploaded, date and recorded by).

The cool thing is that search, filter and sorting and be applied one after the other, in any order. So you can locate a call record by name ‘echo’ recorded on a ‘Sunday’ and ordered by ‘increasing duration’.

The configuration page is an exact replica of the the configuration dialog. It has five tabs, for general options, update settings, recording params, association and advanced. Each of these tabs show a subset of the settings in that particular group.

This is our first step in integrating the desktop client with our web application. Going forward it will be a seamless experience. All the services offered by our web application (sharing, transcribing etc.) will now be delivered through this particular interface.

Apart from the UI change, several bug fixes also went into this release. One of the major bug fix was the issue of connection getting lost between the client and Skype because of which the calls would not get recorded automatically. Now we have added a keep alive mechanism to keep the connection going.

Another major bug fix was the long startup time it used to take if you had a large number of call records stored. That used to happen because of the flat xml file database we used earlier. Now we have moved to sqlite database. So once all your files are migrated, the next startup will be very fast.

Please update now. And please send us your feedback on the UI changes.

Update: Here’s a detailed post on the technology behind the browser based UI. Have a look if you have questions regarding it.

The changelog for version 1.0.6.8 is as follows.

Changes:

A new option, pause recording was added to the popup menu. It gets enabled when a recording is in progress and can be used to temporarily pause the recording during any call. Its functionally equivalent to the pause recording on the toolbar. Thanks to Chris for suggesting this feature.

The toolbar is now displayed whenever the Call Graph system tray icon is clicked.

Upload and download progress functionality was added in this release. The percentages are now displayed on the tooltip of the Call Graph system tray icon as well as the toolbar status when its in progress.

A warning message is displayed if during exit, if a call record upload is in progress.

A bug which prevented records which had apostrophe’s in its name or path from being played was fixed. Thanks to Johnathan for reporting this issue.

Several more minor fixes and changes. Please update now.

What’s Next:

Revamp of the History UI, faster startup if you have large number of call records. Stay tuned.

Thanks for using Call Graph once again and please keep the feedback coming in.

The update we did yesterday unfortunately broke the upload functionality. It was because of the unicode changes we had done. The issue has been fixed with version 1.0.6.7. Please update if you are facing the issue.

Version 1.0.6.6 is out. Here’s a list of changes that went in.

We added support for Unicode in this release. So you can use any characters in your call record names, tags etc. It should also not complain if index.xml files have Umlaut, Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese etc. characters in them. This was a much requested feature from our users.

A recommended transcription settings button in the configuration dialog, recordings page. This sets the parameters which we recommend if you want to get your call record transcribed by us. Thanks to Tim for suggesting this feature.

During the association process, if we detect that your firewall is preventing us from accessing the website, we show a warning now. This was preventing some of our users from completing the association process. Similarly for the ‘Check for updates’ operation.

Earlier if Call Graph was running and you tried to start it again from the start menu then we used to show a message saying ‘Another instance is running, aborting’. That has been removed now. It now brings up the toolbar of the already running process.

The toolbar was enhanced and now it has a more descriptive status bar and a button for the configuration dialog. The status bar has links to be blog for common problems that are encountered and tips on how to resolve them.

There was a bug in the ‘Run at startup’ option which prevented Call Graph from being started during computer boot up. That has been fixed now. Thanks to Mathew for pointing it out.

It also contains numerous other bug fixes.

What’s Next:

Faster startup, better history UI, tighter integration with the web service etc. Stay tuned.

As usual, feedback is welcome. Send us a mail or leave a comment if you want.

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.

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.

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!