Voxeo Developers Corner

When we released the GA version of Prophecy 10, one of the most fundamental changes was one we also didn’t talk a whole lot about in the announcements.  As part of the time we spent looking at how to make Prophecy even more simple and intuitive to developers, we spent a great amount of time working on a new user interface for the “Commander” management console.  We’re quite pleased with the result:

Easy icons along the top letting you switch between major area.  Simple entry points from the dashboard to let you jump into frequently-used areas. Nice and clean.

Have you checked it out?  If so, what do you think?

If you haven’t tried Prophecy 10 yet, it is available for free download for Microsoft Windows, Linux or Mac OS X at:

www.voxeo.com/prophecy

We’d love to hear your feedback!

Well, that exact quote cannot be found in the Sherlock Holmes novels from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. But it is used so often that it got “common use”. And it fits perfect related to our latest enhancement of VoiceObjects (all versions!): WATSON Watson is a real elementary new tool for you and your communication with Voxeo Support regarding any VoiceObjects issue.

What is it all about?

Ever stumbled on “What data to send to support”? Then the next quote comes into account: “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.” (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)) As Voxeo Support always aims in getting better, we would like to get rid of these uncertainties. For you to get the best support in the shortest time possible. For us to avoid theorizing on your issue and getting lost in false assumptions.

Watson will help both of us!

Watson is a tool to collect all data of interest from your VoiceObjects instance. It will gather logs, settings, database information and some other things. All these information go into one archive which can then easily be uploaded to the Evolution portal when opening a ticket or when support is asking for more data.

What is it not?

Watson is not designed to analyze your information It is just the collector of information. Therefore “You see, but you do not observe.” (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)) is also true.

Analyzing your information is a task for the support team. Additionally, we will be very happy to help you understand the file contents for your own assessment of issues!

Details?

Please see the knowledgebase article on Watson for a more detailed usage description. The nice thing about Watson is that you can use it in older versions of VoiceObjects too – just get the setup archive from the knowledgebase article and get started!

Now some of you might think – “Hey, I have seen something similar already”. Yes, we copied ourselves. Shamelessly ;) Watson has been inspired by our Prophecy “Perry” tool which is located in your local Prophecy installation. So in case of an issue while running Prophecy Pro on your premises you might be asked to run “prophecy run perry” and Watson.

Nice, isn’t it?

Many thanks to Jochen Fischer for this tool!

As I’ve long been a fan of ReadWriteWeb, I was pleased to see that this past week they launched “ReadWriteHack“, a new “channel” focused on developers. It’s available at:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/

As their intro says:

Our Channel ReadWriteHack, sponsored by the Intel Atom Developer Program, is a resource and guide for developers. ReadWriteHack will outline best practices for designing and developing applications. We will also provide examples of hacks and how they work, to inspire you and show you what’s possible.

It’s great to see RWW adding a focus on developers, and it’s certainly joined my list of sites to regularly follow. Looking forward to seeing what they write about!

This has absolutely nothing to with “Voxeo” development tools, per se, but I thought it might be of interest to any of you out there who edit code in a text editor.  Adam Kalsey in our Voxeo Labs team recently pointed out this nice font, Anonymous Pro, that is a fixed-width sans-serif font specifically designed for coding:

I’m admittedly a sucker for anything related to typography, so I did have to check it out.  It’s a set of TrueType fonts for Windows, MacOS X and Linux developed by Mark Simonson and available for free under the Open Font License.  Code looks quite nice in the font when editing.

Another similar font I’ve enjoyed using is “Inconsolata” developed by Raph Levien and also available for free under the Open Font License:

You might ask – why does this matter? I mean, programming code doesn’t have any formatting when it’s compiled, so who cares about the font! Well… if you are working for much of the day using a code editor, it can be great to use a typeface that makes your code very readable on the computer screen or printed output.

What do you think? Are there other fonts that you’ve found you like to use for working with code? (There are many out there…)