eXe 1.0 Released

Today marks a bit of a watershed for me - the eXe team has released the long awaited 1.0 version of the eLearning XHTML Editor.

Whew!!!

The highs and lows of working on an Open Source project could fill a large, large... blog post, but all I can say is that at the moment it feels pretty good. It feels good to have been part of something that has had input and impact on a global scale. Along the way the eXe team has physically been places: Australia, Ghana, USA, India, Netherlands, Peru and the US talking about eXe, giving workshops, participating in the community, and we've met heaps of people from all over the world online as well. So here's also a huge "cheers" to all those people who asked questions on the forums, filed bug reports, translated eXe, blogged about us, stopped by IRC to have a chat, or even just downloaded it and gave it a shot.

Its not easy. No way is it easy. Making software completely from scratch is a hard yard and you can see why a lot of it just languishes on Sourceforge. But making Open Source software can be incredibly rewarding if you can pull it off. And I think that we may have done just that ... time for a beer.

Tags: exe

iPod ... meet eXe

iPod Video, originally uploaded by Alexandre Van de Sande.

One of the areas we are continuing to explore with the eXe project is making educational resources available in a variety of formats, including mobile content delivery. In the 0.23 release of eXe, we've added a prototype of an export function that writes the Notes format used by the Apple iPod. There are several limitations imposed by this format, including being restricted to unstyled text, a strict page size limit, and a design that makes it difficult to include images or audio. However, even with these severe limitations, certain types of read only resources are still usable and are now very portable.

The File > Export > iPod Notes menu item in eXe will prompt for a folder to be used for the export. Within that folder, it creates a new folder with the current eXe package name that contains the table of contents and all of the pages. Simply copy that new folder to the Notes directory of an iPod to make the resource available on the go.

If you don't own an iPod but have some other kind of mobile device that you'd like to be able to get your eXe content onto, try the Text export under the same menu.

Tags: eXe, iPod, mobile, elearning