Announcing Quirkos version 2!

Today we are announcing that a major new version of Quirkos is coming in September! Version 2  will offer big new features that users have requested, including memos, rich text support, new editable reports, an improved interface, and much more.

Memos are a feature that people have been requesting for a while, and we are excited to have this coming in the next version. This allows users to write notes which are attached to specific segments of your text sources. You can write long or short comments, and these can be used in approaches like IPA and in-vivo coding which were difficult to achieve in Quirkos before.

These memos are visible anywhere your text is, so you will see them connected to your text in the quotes overview, in search and query results as well. We’ve made adding and working with memos as simple and intuitive as the rest of Quirkos – jut drag and drop a section of text into the memo column to add a new memo, and type straight away. You can also toggle the memo column open and closed if you want to focus on just your text and coding at any time.

It has been nearly 4 years since we released the very first beta of Quirkos to users, and since then all our updates have been free, and kept backward and forward project compatibility. We don’t charge ongoing fees, or have licences that expire, and these options will continue into the future. For these reasons we think that Quirkos offers the fairest and best value licences for qualitative software.

While there will be a small upgrade fee for users on version 1.x wanting the extra features of 2.x, we will create a final free release for version 1 (1.6) to make sure that it will be backward and forward compatible. We never want to see a situation where people can’t share project files because they are using different versions of Quirkos, and lock their projects into an outdated version. Unlike some other qualitative software packages, we will never do this. So don’t worry: even if you don’t need the new capabilities of 2.0, you won’t be forced to upgrade because of lack of support or backward compatibility. We are qualitative researchers too, and want to minimise these headaches!

We’re also announcing that anyone that buys Quirkos from now until the release date will get a free upgrade to version 2 when it is available, an offer that also applies to anyone that brought Quirkos in July and August.

If you do want to upgrade, there will be a simple process to change your licence code and download the new version, and you will still be able to keep working with your projects without doing anything. We’ll let you know when it’s available and how much the upgrade will be for different users.

We also want to assure people about what isn’t changing in Quirkos 2. We will keep the same interface (with a few tweaks), identical compatibility with Windows, Mac and Linux versions, and all the features that were there before. We also don’t plan to add complexity to Quirkos with the new capabilities, and most people will be able to move to version 2 without getting stuck or needing training. We have thousands of dedicated users in hundreds of universities and other organisations, and keeping them happy is what keeps us going!

But version 2 allows us to work towards a new platform that enables a lot of new and exciting capabilities in the future. There are exciting technical innovations and collaborative capabilities coming in Quirkos 2 in the not too distant future, and we are really looking forward to detailing more information in the coming months. We will have more blog posts soon outlining the new things coming to Quirkos this year, and note that 2.0 is only the tip of the iceberg!