Archive for November, 2010

OutWit Hub 1.0

Monday, November 1st, 2010

We have finally released version 1.0 of OutWit Hub, with all the features originally planned plus many others, imagined by our users.

Your help testing the program, reporting bugs and suggesting features was invaluable. We thank our tens of thousands of users for their interest and support and we are especially grateful to the hundreds of beta testers of the Pro features who so actively contributed (some with rather creative test cases). What we particularly appreciated is the diversity of usage we read about in our users feedback: from human resources to SEO, from e-commerce to personal collection, from education to research… And some of you are pushing the application to unexplored limits, which, in turn pushes us to optimize our code as much as we can. We hope you will enjoy the Hub Pro and that it will help you save time and clicks, leave the repetitive, tedious tasks to OutWit and focus on the interesting parts of your job.

Of course, version 1.0 is only the beginning and there are so many items in our to do list that we don’t dare to look at the whole thing anymore. We split it in milestones and, version by version, we will go from a rather powerful extraction tool to an autonomous web explorer, collecting, organizing and sharing data and media for you.

The next step is an internal tutorial/wizard system, which will allow us and anybody to produce walkthroughs for the most common extraction tasks. OutWit Hub’s Help system is pretty good. It covers all the programs’ features in a rather detailed way but, to be honest, users don’t read it. What is needed is a series of step-by-step tutorials to replace the few and outdated ones that can be found on this blog. They will reside in the application itself. Then, this wizard system will by extended into a scripting engine and finally a mashup generation system… No release calendar yet, but these are clearly our focus for the coming months.

Thanks again to all those who helped and I hope you will enjoy the program.

JC