Important Messages, such as Service Disruption and Opening Times.
Hartgen Consultancy closing dates are as follows:
Friday 20 December 2024 through to Monday 6 January 2025.
During these dates, urgent technical support queries, together with sales orders, will be processed by Email only.
This is exactly the same procedure as previous years.
Are usual opening hours are Monday to Friday 9 AM to 5 PM UK time, excluding public holidays.
Leasey Upgrade Pricing and What's New in Version 5!
Hi to all
During the past few weeks, we've had quite a number of people learning what Leasey is all about and purchasing the product and we thank you for that. This has been largely due to various users advocating the benefits of Leasey on Email lists, Twitter and Facebook, together with Vispero's FSCast which gave us a lot of airtime.
All of our products, without exception, have an annual upgrade price applied to them. However, Leasey did not have this last year. The last upgrade cost we asked for was at the start of February 2018.
If you would like to obtain the new Leasey version 5 when it is made available in March 2020, and subsequent updates, the cost will once again be £20 which is $26.
In line with the policy applied to our other products, if Leasey (or an upgrade to it) has been purchased since December 2019, you will automatically be entitled to a free upgrade. We always give a three month grace period.
One thing to make clear. If you do not wish to upgrade Leasey to benefit from new features moving forward, you will still be able to access your earlier licence in the future should you need to reinstall it. The activation will not disappear just because you have not upgraded. However, if you do want to benefit from the good things to come this year, you will need to pay the upgrade fee. As well as funding Leasey development, it ensures that we can tap into the services we use for weather, news and other sources, all of which have to be paid for.
To ensure you can use the update on the day of release, feel free to purchase an upgrade licence here.
If you have any difficulty purchasing the upgrade, please feel free to get in touch with us.
What We've Achieved in the Past Two Years.
Leasey has undergone an enormous amount of work during the past two years, the highlights of which include:
- The Weather app was completely rewritten to make use of a new service. This included adding far more detail than users had before. When it was released to the public, further refinements were made to it and subsequently released.
- TVMaze search was made available to search for TV shows past and present and to give information about shows.
- The ability to create a new Outlook Email message, a new Outlook appointment, and a new Outlook task from any application. Microsoft Outlook does not need to be running initially to use this feature.
- Unprotect Microsoft generated documents with a keystroke.
- Support for the WordWeb dictionary.
- New radio stations added to the radio directory and the ability to update streams remotely when they change.
- Added a fully-featured currency converter which is incredibly easy to use.
- Added full support for the Last.FM service to browse music and gain information about it including song lyrics.
- Implemented an RSS newsreader.
- Re-worked the support for Spotify.
- Introduced Time Monitoring so you can monitor for synchronising a clock.
- Various calendar features, such as "Get Days From Dates", to view how many days fall between two dates, and "Days of Future and Past", so as to find out the date when a number of days have elapsed.
- A setting to take you directly into the properties for your soundcard.
- progress Bar indicator sounds to indicate progress of file downloads in browsers and most other progress bars.
- Move to the first or last instance of a web page element.
- Keystrokes in Microsoft Word to move to first, next, previous and last spelling and grammatical errors.
- New attachments list in Microsoft Outlook.
- LeaseyConnect, our Address Book, was completely rewritten.
- Added functionality to rename LeaseyNotes or move them from one category to another.
- Added more functionality to the HTML Assistant.
- Added support for the Microsoft Outlook calendar.
- Created a new interface to ensure ElBraille is easier to work with.
- Ensured our LeaseySelect facility could work in Mozilla Thunderbird.
Those are just the improvements which come to mind at present. Apart from very visible features, a lot went on behind the scenes, to improve Leasey's overall file structure and record LeaseyBite audio tutorials. We also made the Leasey User Guide available in text DAISY format.
More importantly, what is coming up this time?
To get us started this year, these are just some of the improvements we hope to make available in March 2020.
- We're currently testing support for Netflix. You can search by movie or TV show title, actor name etc, and get results back. When watching an item, you can use keystrokes similar to those we have for YouTube, such as Pause and Play, Volume Up and Down, Fast Forward and Rewind. We even have a facility to browse titles with audio description.
- In Chrome and Microsoft Edge browsers, it is now possible to toggle whether JAWS speaks the auto-complete information as text is typed into the Address Bar. Similarly, when moving through the auto-complete list of entries with Up and Down Arrow, the output is cleaner and easier to understand.
- In Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, you can save a web page shortcut to your Favourites folder, or any folder of your choosing. We would prefer you use LeaseyCuts as they are quicker and easier to manage, but that facility is there.
- Added Leasey support in Firefox to indicate via an audio cue when a new page is loaded, when you move back a page, and other functionality specific to Leasey available in other browsers.
- We previously added a script to end selection and copy it to the Clipboard automatically. A key has been introduced so as to end the selection and append the text to the clipboard.
- When creating a LeaseyClip, and no text is selected, we use the text on the clipboard instead.
- LeaseySearch now allows you to search the new RNIB Home Reading service for the downloading of books in DAISY format.
- Many people use our list of attachments script in Microsoft Outlook to bring all attachments into a vertical list. We've added the ability to copy those attachments to an alternative location in addition to opening them.
- We've undertaken some work in Outlook meeting requests so as to provide some improved spoken output when navigating items you have received.
- When using the list of recent Google searches list, we've given you the ability to remove an item from it. Some people make heavy use of this list.
- When using OpenTween, we've ensured that entries from LeaseyConnect can be accessed. This was working, but due to the change in Leasey's file structure it stopped being available.
- Added more functionality into the HTML Assistant by customer request.
- A keystroke exists to speak the Windows version number being used.
- When carrying out searches in Leasey's YouTube search, and on Google, the first result was not being located. This is now fixed.
- If Leasey's sound scheme is enabled, and you move to a previous page, a "backward" sound is heard. Leasey already has the ability to play a sound when a new page loads.
There are also some other features in the works. For example, we are looking at the ability through LeaseySearch to search the MixCloud service of audio shows. This looks very promising.
We hope people will continue to enjoy all that Leasey has to offer!