Here we come with spring and a new 8.1 release of the software.
Once again we’ve been developing hard to come out with new powerful features and stick to the various needs you’re gathering with us, while remaining committed to high quality standards. Hence this new delivery not only brings quite a lot of enhancements and new features, but also improves global performances and reliability.
Emphasizing some of the coolest changes:
An old project finalized: the event creation wizard has been completely reshaped. It’s more straight forward than ever to get any standard race type ready in a few clicks. More flexible also to get enriched with new templates and with data from your beloved sport federations worldwide. We’re looking forward your comments and ideas!
For your professional requirements, the G-Live module can now embed some user-defined exporters. They can make automatic file exports or send live network data. Successfully used to feed some TV overlays at French national Cross championships.
Saving time on setting the GPS coordinates of your split points, now selectable on the map.
And making your life easier, the quick access toolbar will now hold your favorite features for instant access.
In its previous delivery, Wiclax introduced a new powerful framework to help with live data projection. Whatever your video device looks like, being it a wide led screen with a limited resolution or a big TV screen, you can freely design what you want to get displayed in live. Remember that the solution relies on the G-Live module, so you only need a Web browser somewhere on your local network which will broadcast the screening.
Thanks to this nice architecture in place, we can now go forward with new features.
A screen configuration was already able to include some pictures and some basic animations programmed to be displayed with some transition effects. Of course the text sizes, the background and foreground colors were customizable but you may expect more possibilities. Hence here what’s will come with the next release: the ability to attach your own CSS styles to any element, for example a text label but also rows and cells of a result list.
CSS is the standard language used to style every Web page. It’s not too difficult to learn and of course you’ll find thousands of resources to help you in discovering what it can achieve. Just imagine you can play with gradient backgrounds, borders, rotations, paddings and margins, text shadows, font styling, transparencies and much more.
Better a picture than a thousand words, here’s a sample to illustrate that:
Last but not least, we’ll plan to deliver such samples for your inspiration, as well as some other ready to use configurations. Then we’re waiting for your next wishes!
Not the most well known feature of the Wiclax solution, the Championships module can nonetheless be very helpful to you. You may already need it, or it can happen that you get suddenly requested for a tricky classification to perform over multiple events.
Getting started
The module is accessible from your Windows Start menu, searching for Championships or looking into the Wiclax submenu.
You'll basically create a new championship ranking in two steps:
Feed the list of events to work on. These will be the .clax files you used to time them.
Specify which rules apply for the ranking computation.
Computing a ranking
Once the setup is completed, just click the calculate button.
The ranking gets calculated and you can then export the result as a new Wiclax event file.
All possibilities
The module helps you with a variety of powerful features:
Defining some points to grant to competitors based on their ranks in each event - overall or in the category. If necessary you will be able to differentiate each race in the events, typically when it's about different distances.
Defining some additional rules like a minimal number of events participated, or a bonus granted for at least n events participated. This list is not exhaustive and may evolve based on new needs you'll encounter.
Dealing with competitor merging: a major issue with informal championships, when anyone can participate to the events without being registered at a global level, is that you're dependent on the data you get as input. And of course you cannot expect a same participant to have his name spelled in the exact same way through the different events he runned. So here comes the merging feature: after a primary level of computation you will be prompted with a list of individuals being likely the same person. Just remains you to decide and the final ranking will be made accordingly.
New in version 8 is the ability to open a network service that makes your participant data editable from a remote station/device.
This can be a great help for example if you want to dedicate a member of your team for a participant registration follow up, while you can strictly focus on timing the current race.
How to make it work
Almost nothing to do for that: the service is opened by default when Wiclax gets launched and as soon as an event is active, the participant data can be edited remotely.
Simply find the Network button in the Registrations tab, and you'll get the address of the service in the dropdown menu. Type this address in the browser of a tablet connected to your local network and here you go.
You're getting this kind of screen, showing the name of the active event and a minimal registration form:
What can you do with the service?
The application can do the following:
Lookup some existing participant data: either typing a bib number or part of a name
Modify the data for a registered participant
Register a new participant, providing his/her bib number (an alert will tell if it's already allocated)
Register a new participant, letting Wiclax allocate him/her an available bib number. This number will be determined by the races' bib ranges if any, and will be displayed right after the validation.
Display the history of the registrations made on the device, for an easy go-back when necessary.
On Wiclax side, a greenmark icon appears on a participant row when he's been added remotely. The mark disappears at the next file saving. Remember that only this file saving operation makes the remote modifications definitely saved.
Note: to simplify, only one single service is active at a given time on your PC. So in case you're working with multiple instances of Wiclax, remember that the last one that was alone when launched owns the service. Having a doubt or wishing to switch for another event: check the Network menu. It will propose to hijack the active event in case it's not the current one.
Here is a quick video to show you how easy it is to add a logo at the top of the results printout. Note that many logos can be added, either at the top or at the bottom or both. A customized header can also replace the existing one.
Classic race week-end: you're having to deal with multiple races spread across Saturday and Sunday. Each of them holds its own bib number range, but eventually you discover lately that the organizer made two of them overlap.
You want to avoid any perturbation in a simple way. For example some runners hanging around your mats/antennas with their bib for next day's race. Or other kinds of interference like clothing chips holding a plausible id (note: this is a good reason among others that makes filtering also useful in a single race configuration).
At the same time you want to make your chips encoding as easy as possible. Though the software can deal with chip-bib correspondence tables, it's always a waste of time to feed them and a non-necessary source of errors.
Here's what you'll use: chip filters in the software and a prefixing of your chip ids at encoding.
Chip encoding policy
Your chip ids will be made of 2 parts:
a unique number identifying the race - for example 0147. This number will be simply incremented after each race
the actual bib number
Giving for example this chip id for bib #4356: 01470004356
Chip filters in Wiclax
Open the acquisitions form, and look for the interference filter panel in the status bar:
Check the Filter active option. Enter the prefix that will identify the only chips you want to see read, and the number of trailing digits that will compose the actual bib number. In our sample case: 0147 is the prefix and 7 is the number of digits to care about.
Close the panel. The status bar now indicates that there's a filter active:
And that's it!
In case you're in doubt after that, seeing a chip discarded and wondering why, remember you can check the acquisition log. All filtered readings land there:
