An early spring update on Quirkos for 2016

About this time last year, I posted an update on Quirkos development for the next year. Even though February continues to be cold and largely snow-drop free in Scotland, why not make it a tradition?!

It’s really amazing how much Quirkos has grown over the last 18 months since our first release. We now have hundreds of users in more than 50 universities across the world. The best part of this is that we now get much more feedback and suggestions from qualitative researchers who are using Quirkos for different projects. Although we have always had a ‘road-map’ for developing new features for Quirkos, it’s been an aim to keep that flexible so we adapt to people’s needs.

We are planning a new update for Quirkos (free of course) for the end of March 2016. This version (1.4) will be a fairly major upgrade, but as ever will be released at the same time for Windows, Mac and Linux, with identical features and compatibility across all three.

The most significant improvement will be speed. Although v1.3 did improve this a little, it was not enough. The underlying ‘engine’ for coding and highlights was laggy and slow with large projects, and required complete rewriting from scratch. It has justifiably been the biggest source of criticism so far about Quirkos, but we hope this will now remove the last thing holding many users back. This has taken months, which is why this release is a little later than our typical quarterly updates. However, the difference so far is amazing: a near 10 fold increase in speed when loading, coding and editing sources. Although the interface will still look the same, everyone will notice the under-the-hood difference in small and large projects alike.

There will also be a few minor bug fixes in this release. We had reports that when moving encrypted projects between Windows and Mac, passwords were not accepted. We’ve fixed this issue, and a few others that people have reported. There are also several small improvements suggested by users that should make exploring the data easier. So please always e-mail us with bugs or suggestions, everything reported gets investigated, and we try and fix issues as soon as we can!

We will be sending the new version out to an international group of beta-testers at the end of February, so we are confident that everything works as intended before we make it publicly available. The best way to keep abreast of updates is to follow our Twitter feed: twitter.com/quirkossoftware which is usually updated every day.

Looking forward, the next release (v1.5) is due for the summer, and will add some exciting new features, probably including the second most frequently requested addition: memos! Proper note taking functionality is top of many people’s request lists, and will make it much easier to record researcher’s ponderings during the analysis process. For the meantime, check out our blog post article on how to record and code your notes in Quirkos. We also hope to add a lot more tools to help look at word-frequency in their qualitative data sets, including the ever popular word clouds!

In addition to all this, we will have a major new collaboration to announce in the next few months. This is going to represent a major leap forward in functionality for Quirkos, bringing some top minds into the fray to work on the next generation of qualitative analysis software.

So far, we have reinvested all our sales income into development, to make sure that we keep making the software better, and keep current and future users happy. Since all our updates are free, the best way to support further development is to buy a licence, and you will always benefit from work we do in the future to add new capabilities, and be able to suggest the features that will make your qualitative research easier and more fun.