Views from Verbatrix

The past few weeks have been very eventful here at Verbatrix, and not in a good way. We have repeatedly been hit with attacks on the website that even at one point necessitated the entire server having to be completely rebuilt, down to reformatting and fresh installation of the operating system. Everything is now sorted out and locked down! This work has had the knock-on effect of hindering the preparations for the release of version 1.1 of GridForge Studio but we have managed to keep improving it and adding even more features. We have taken the opportunity to revamp the website with a new look and new features, including this blog.

When I first had the idea for GridForge Studio the goal was to build a wordsearch puzzle creator that could give me much more control over the directions that words were placed rather than the usual random choice from a chosen set. As the application was developed I realised that there was potential to develop wordsearch puzzles in ways that no one seemed to have thought of before and my goal became to create the most powerful, feature packed and straightforward to use wordsearch creator in existance. A few months later I was certain that we had succeeded. So what next?

I wanted to provide more value for money. Sure, GridForge Studio was by far the best wordsearch maker in the world, whether looked at from an educational point of view or from a puzzle book creator's point of view, but in the end it was limited to creating wordsearch puzzles. Puzzles like no-one had ever seen before, but still wordsearch puzzles. So next I decided to give the Verbatrix treatment to cloze exercises, the new aim was to create the best cloze / gap fill exercise creator in the world. As we worked on this ideas came into my head, and we gradually added a host of features, many of which are, so far as I know, unique. This part of the project could be declared a success, GridForge Studio now included what is definitely the most advanced cloze generator in existance.

During the development of the cloze exercise maker one of my coders mentioned readability, so the next component I decided to add was a text analyser. There are several very good text analysers available, so my goal was modified a little from producing the best text analyser in the world to creating something that was the most useful, and the equal of anything else available. I am confident that we succeeded.