Article by
alphasoftware.com
I had the privilege this month to interview Amer Qaqish,Vice President of Bernard D&G. Bernard D&G is the author of several software programs, including a tremendous tool called Turbo Demo. I have been using Turbo Demo over the past several months to create the Alpha Five tutorials that have been presented here in the newsletter. Within the Alpha community there is a grass roots group forming around Turbo Demo with the intention of bringing quick, easy, free, and structured, internet available tutorials on Alpha Five. Amer and Bernard D&G have been most helpful in this endeavor.
Q: Amer, tell us about Bernard D&G.
Bernard D&G is an innovative software company and market leader in the
development of intelligent application software for the Internet. We develop and
distribute E-Learning Software Solutions and Internet-Filtering Software
Solutions. Bernard D&G is represented by distributors in over 20 countries. Our
products are sold in over 100 countries worldwide.
Q: When did Bernard D&G first come into existence?
Bernard & Corporation Company has been supplying fashion equipment and
developing software for the fashion industry since 1963. In 1998, Bernard D&G
expanded their software development into other ventures.
Q: Can you tell us what you do with Bernard D&G?
I'm Vice President of the company and also in charge of our Marketing and Sales
departments.
Q: Bernard D&G is a German company is it not?
Our headquarters are based in Germany. We have an American subsidiary in
Washington DC and we offer all our customers a worldwide toll free number.
Q: Can you tell us how you came to be with Bernard D&G?
I was the general manager of a German company named Top Systems, employed as a
reseller for the German market. I introduced Turbo Demo to the German Market.
The CEO of Bernard D&G and I are working together as partners to market our
software worldwide. I began working with Bernard D&G as a partner in July 2002.
Q: Is Turbo Demo your only software product?
No, we offer InternetWatcher ,
EasyTex and
Turbo Demo . But, we devote most of our
time and resources to Turbo Demo.
Q: Can you tell us when and how Turbo Demo was first
conceived?
We began with worldwide distribution of our EasyTex-software. Due to the fact
that our customer base was worldwide, we had varying time differences between
ourselves and our customers. It became necessary to create tutorials as a
customer support tool to answer our customers promptly. At that time authoring
tools offered only AVI-Formats with a very large file size. We began to research
for other methods and started using Turbo Demo internally in order to aid our
customers with feedback.
Q: Interesting, so Turbo Demo was actually an internal
tool that was too good to keep to yourselves. There is an analogy here with
Alpha Five version 5. Alpha Software had developed Xdialog, a superset of Xbasic,
to be able to quickly and easily create user interface objects for Alpha Five.
It turned out to be such a great tool that they decided to expose it to the
users of Alpha Five.
Exactly, sometimes one takes a moment to re-think a concept or idea and you
discover in turn that other companies are also searching for the answer to your
question
Q: My first requirement for a tutorial building tool
was that it must allow the user, me, to quickly build tutorials. Turbo Demo is
the fastest tutorial building tool that I have found. Was this one of your
design goals for Turbo Demo?
Thanks for the compliment. It was one of our main goals. Our primary task was to
provide TurboDemo users with a tool which can explain a process to someone else
by using an internet platform. As I mentioned earlier, we used Turbo Demo as an
internal tool to show EasyTex-Cutomers how to use our software before it became
public. Users expect quality software which is also easy to use.
Q: I understand that Turbo Demo is built with a number
of software languages, Delphi, Java, and C++. Can you tell us why this mix of
languages was used?
Turbo Demo offers a variety of different format compilations such as Flash,
Java, AVI and EXE-Files. Thus, different programming languages are needed in
order to create these different formats. By using three software languages we
take on the difficulties in development but offer our customers the benefits and
ease generated by this complexity
Q: Tell us a little about the size of a Turbo Demo
produced tutorial. There are still a huge number of computer users connecting to
the internet via a dial-up connection. I can tell you I have tested out Turbo
Demo tutorials over a dial-up connection and have been very impressed with the
results.
It is one of our objectives to generate tutorials that are as small as possible.
We know that there are still a lot of users with restricted internet capacity.
We developed enhanced compression in addition to streaming technology and the
usage of formats such as Java and Flash in order to keep the file size small. An
average size for a 1 minute tutorial is between 100KB - 350 KB. If you compare
it to an AVI-Movie it is 5-10 times smaller.
Q: Turbo Demo really surprised me with its simplicity.
When I downloaded the demo version, I found that in a very short time, minutes
actually, I was creating basic tutorials. Granted, they were not ready for
publication, but I actually had them up and running. I have to tell you that
this really sold me on Turbo Demo. Was this one of your design goals?
Thanks! Let me explain this. If you try to generate a demo or tutorial using
Macromedia FLASH MX or JAVA, then you will become really frustrated, especially
if you don't have any experience in these programming languages. Our idea was to
creating an emulator to help people generate tutorials without prior programming
knowledge.
Q: As you know, my purpose in seeking out a tutorial
creation program is to create tutorials for Alpha Five version 5. I was very
pleased when I found Turbo Demo as it fit my parameters very well. I wanted a
software program that would allow me to quickly build tutorials. Another top
priority was that the tutorials needed to stream well over the internet, even
with a dial-up connection. And finally, I wanted a tutorial format that would
run on the vast majority of computers out there without any special proprietary
drivers or viewers. Can you tell us about the output formats that Turbo Demo
creates?
Customers are using either Windows95, 98, 2000, ME, NT, XP,Windows Terminal
Server, Unix or Macintosh. This means we need a format to provide the author
with a way to aid him/her in order to present the viewers with a tutorial or
demo. Therefore we tried to provide all available formats on the market. You can
create your Demos/Tutorials in the following formats without programming
knowledge:
You can reach Amer at: sales@turbodemo.com