April has come and is ending quickly. Has this month flown by for you as it has for us? What a blur. I thought I would check in real quick with some small reminders and updates since it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. Over the past couple of weeks we’ve been queuing up some news on TorqueX, education, web-site updates, docs, and some other topics that I won’t even mention without them being a title of their own blog. Those blogs are in the works, but we aren’t quite ready to share all of the information yet.

iTorque

As you know, we’ve been running a promotion for the iPad. If you purchased iTorque in the month of April, you are in the drawing for an iPad. We are also running a discount on the 2D version if you use the coupon code ITORQUEIPAD. This promotion ends this Friday at 11:59 AM PST, so get in while you still can.

The topic of Apple’s new TOS has created a lot of emotion both here and across the development community. We’ve discussed the terms with our legal counsel and we all feel very confident that we are compliant.

It's a great time to have an engine that runs on C++ and Objective C and still utilizes Xcode.

TGB Update

TGB 1.7.5 is in QA. We are expecting to receive the OK from QA before the end of the month so that we meet the deadline that we promised you in March. The Mac version has a few more final touches than the PC version, but we are hopeful that they will arrive together on Friday.

This version includes many fixes including OS support for XP, Vista, Win7, Snow Leopard, Leopard, and fixes for Visual Studio 2008. Also included are many fixes for stability and memory allocation.

We’ve seen quite an increase in TGB sales; we believe this is due to the rise in social casual and core casual games which TGB is so well suited for.

Thanks to everyone who's been helping us with the bug fixes.

TorqueX

As you know, we are re-committed to TorqueX after a couple years of sparse resource allocation. We've upped the personnel from 1 to 7 people with one full time person dedicated to user experience. This combined with our new QA team should get the ball rolling on both near and long term updates.

QA & Usability

The release of TGB 1.7.5 marks our first round of work with the Full Sail University QA and Usability Lab. They have performed compatability testing and bug tracking along with automation scripts. The QA division is new, so there is still some work needs to have the lab running at 100%, but it's a great start and the lessons learned will help us in our next round. We've started doing some experimental usability runs as well. Getting data straight from brand new users as opposed to interpretation of forum comments and individual opinions is proving to be a very valuable tool in our decision making process.

Alright everyone, I've gotta get back to work. We are heads down working towards and extremely busy May. BTW, be sure to congratulate Scott Burns and Dave Wyand who became full time employees in April. Glad to have you two on board!