February News from Hartgen Consultancy!

Hi to all

We're heading towards the end of February, so we thought it was a good idea to let you know what's been happening at Hartgen Consultancy since just before Christmas. An ever increasing amount of JAWS scripting work is taking place at different customer sites in the UK, but we've still found time to do some product development. So lets tell you about it.

StationPlaylist Studio Scripts.

A new release of the scripts for StationPlaylist Studio 5.3 will be available in very early March. The primary focus of this release is improving the Braille support, particularly in respect of displaying items in the Playlist Viewer and also support for timers. Many people for example use the Braille countdown timer to alert them as to when a music track is ending. This has been improved together with a number of other areas.

A useful tip. Having tested the countdown timer feature over many hours of broadcasting, there are times when you will want to deactivate it. For example, if you wish to use the system clock which counts seconds on the Braille display, we suggest you deactivate the end of track timer temporarily. You can do this even in the current version by pressing the SPL Key then A. Press it again to switch it back on.

In other areas, the keystroke ALT+Windows+Control+C to copy the playlist to the clipboard now works as we intended. So you can copy it to the clipboard in various permutations, or indeed to a text file in a shared location, such as a Dropbox folder, if you are collaborating with someone on a programme. There's also usefully a feature to easily create Windows shortcuts pointing to files for playback by Studio; useful for quickly categorising items for playout.

Leasey.

Plenty of work is happening in terms of Leasey. Version 4.1 will be released at some point in March and we're ready to tell you about some of the changes.

Added 30 more news sources to LeaseyNews.

Added the ability to LeaseyNews to search for headlines across 5000 news sources. So if you want the top headlines across all these sources, you can type in a key word and it will come back with a number of results.

When using LeaseyWeather, particularly the week's forecast, we now tell you the day as well as the date.

Included the ability to remove all items from any of the recent searches you have carried out using LeaseySearch, such as weather locations and Google searches.

When viewing one of the default jaws research it tools in the results viewer, such as weather, sometimes the URL it was pointing to would convert to lower case and thus the web page could not be retrieved for sources such as weather underground. This should now be fixed.
Don't forget that Leasey includes functionality to view web pages emanating from the Research It tool in your default browser, such as Google Chrome or Firefox.

The read audible book summary key, Leasey Key then alt control S, should now be working as expected following changes on the Audible website.

In OpenTween, pressing the Leasey Key then I will now tell you the number of characters remaining when composing a tweet.

As the 280 character limit is reached in OpenTween when composing a tweet, Leasey no longer says, limit reached. It just plays a tap sound. You can use text movement keys, such as Up and Down Arrow, to read the tweet and you will not hear the tap sound in those instances.

When composing a message in outlook, pressing the leasey key then control shift A will tell you which email account it is being sent from.

Added the Strawberry emoji to the list of emoji.

Solved a problem where, if you set a LeaseyPoint in Word, then you try to move back to it, the contents of the clipboard were being erased.

Fixed a problem where, if you wanted to start a new HTML document in the HTML Editor, you received an unknown function call.

Pressing Control+Windows+Shift+Left and Right Arrow will change the system volume in very small increments.

Added News Talk 980 CKNW radio in Vancouver to LeaseyRadio.

When you visit YouTube or Facebook sites, the access to the pages overall should be of a much higher quality than before. We particularly noticed this on YouTube where the access wasn’t quite as good as it could have been, for example the video comments were not always displayed until you undertook a screen refresh, and so on.

When downloading the games module, the download and running of the installer is much faster.

When creating a LeaseyCut pointing to a web page, in the list of cuts we now display the name of the browser which will launch it.
Note this only works for new cuts.

When using the Leasey countdown timer, you can now schedule a timer for more than 59 minutes. So if you want one hour 5 minutes, you type 65 into the edit field.

Added a keystroke to restart the JAWS program.

Included support for the Skype Windows10 app.

J-Say.

J-Say 16.0 was released at the beginning of this year to provide support for JAWS 2018 and a number of new features. It was slightly modified after we delivered some training in J-Say to a number of users. There will be a very significant free update for J-Say 16 users later this year, particularly containing a feature we know people are going to find helpful.

Training Courses.

At the moment there are no new training courses scheduled. However a number of people have suggested we run a short training course on the OpenTween mainstream Twitter client. If this interests you, do let us know.

That's all the news for now and we will leave you to get on with your day. Have a wonderful week!