Quirkos 1.3 is released!

We are proud to announce a significant update for Quirkos, that adds significant new features, improves performance, and provides a fresh new look. Major changes include:

• PDF import
• Greater ability to work with Levels to group and explore themes
• Improved performance when working with large projects
• New report generation and styling
• Ability to copy and paste quotes directly from search and hierarchy views
• Improved CSV export
• New tree-hierarchy view for Quirks
• Numerous bug fixes
• Cleaner visual look

We’ve made a few tweaks to the way Quirkos looks, tidying up dialogue boxes and improving the general style and visibility, but maintaining the same layout, so there is nothing out of place for experienced users.

There is once again no change to Quirkos project files, so all versions of Quirkos can talk to each other with no issues, and there is no need to do anything to your files – just keep working with your qualitative data. The update is free for all paid users, and a simple process to install. Just download the latest version, install to the same directory as the last release, and the new version will replace the old. There is no need to update the licence code, and we would recommend all users to move to the new version as soon as they can to take advantage of the improvements!

Lots of people have requested PDF support, so that users can add journal articles and PDF reports into Quirkos, and we are happy to say this is now enabled. Please note that at the moment PDF support is limited to text only – some PDF files, especially from older journals that have been scanned in are not actually stored as text, but as a scanned image of text. Quirkos can’t read the text from these PDFs, and you will usually need to use OCR (optical character recognition) software to convert these (included in some professional editions of Acrobat Reader for example).

We have always supported ‘Levels’ in Quirkos, a way to group Quirks that can work across hierarchical groupings and parent-child relationships. Many people desired to work with categories in this way, so we have improved the ways you can work with levels. They are now a refinable category in search results and queries, allowing you to generate a report containing data refined by level, and a whole extra dimension to group your qualitative themes.

Reports have been completely revamped to improve how you share qualitative data, with better images, and a simpler layout. There are now many more options for showing the properties belonging to each quote, streamlined and grouped section headings, better display of hierarchial groupings, and a much more polished, professional look. As always, our reports can be shared as PDF, interactive HTML, or customised using basic CSS and Javascript.

Although the canvas view with distinctive topic bubbles is a distinguishing feature in Quirkos, we know some people prefer to work with a more traditional tree hierarchy view. We’ve taken on board a lot of feedback, and reworked the ‘luggage label’ view to a tree structure, so that it works better with large numbers of nodes. The hierarchy of grouped codes in this view has also been made clearer.

There are also numerous bug fixes and performance improvements, fixing some issues with activation, improving the speed when working with large sources, and some dialogue improvements to the properties editor on OS X.

We are also excited to launch our first release for Linux! Just like all the other platforms, the functionality, interface and project files are identical, so you can work across platforms with ease. There will be a separate blog post article about Quirkos on Linux tomorrow.

We are really excited about the improvements in the new version, so download it today, and let us know if you have any other suggestions or feedback. Nearly all of the features we have added have come from suggestions made by users, so keep giving us your feedback, and we will try and add your dream features to the next version...