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: