Easy-Cut 2.0 – New version, New Pricing

It continues to be a busy year of new and updated product announcements at CompuSports, and we’re just getting started. Earlier this month, we released a new version of Easy-Scout XP Professional, and next week we will begin shipping Easy-Cut 2.0, the other member of our video editing "duo".

Our approach with Easy-Cut was similar to Easy-Scout XP Professional – fine tune existing functionality first, then add additional features and functions.   Like our work with Easy-Scout Pro, Easy-Cut received a number of "user interface" changes that we know our existing and prospective users will like, and many will want to take advantage of the new DIVX output capabilities if Easy-Cut is used to build video files for writing to DVD’s.   The new DIVX  has the potential to improve output quality for all Easy-Cut users, regardless of whether Video Projects are built in Easy-Cut or in Easy-Scout XP Professional.

Easy-Cut 2.0 will also be more useful as a standalone video editor, with the addition of two more category "tags" on the video editing screen. Fine tuning adjustments of the video slider and other video positioning "tweaks" further improve video editing capabilities.

I’m going to hold off on making this a full new feature list, but one other thing I want to mention here is the new single license pricing that is available for Easy-Cut and also for Easy-Scout XP Professional.

Since first introducing these video editing software applications a year ago, we learned that its common for video editing tasks to be performed on only one computer – often a laptop or notebook.   Since we modeled our pricing and licensing for Easy-Scout XP Professional and Easy-Cut after our scouting software, we thought a two-user license was the only type that made sense, since most football coaches split the "scouting" job between at least two computers.

What we found was that with our video products, many users registered only one PC, so we decided to offer a single user license that represents significant savings. 

Easy-Cut 2.0 will be available in two versions, including a new single license version for $195. Trial versions of both products will be available shortly after the official Easy-cut 2.0 release date of March 1, 2007.

“Get a grip” – use your PDA for entering scouting data

It is said that it takes two tries to get it right when you build a home, and my experience certainly confirms that.  Unfortunately, I still live in the first one, if you get my drift.

If you read the article on the history of Easy-Scout, you know our “second try” came quite some time ago. Software, unlike houses, is relatively speaking, has lower barriers for publishers if they want to seek perfection, and that coupled with competition usually makes the ”two try” rule irrelevent.  When we built Easy-Scout XP a few years ago, we made “data portability” the first of our “continuous improvement” priorities.

One thing Easy-Scout didn’t handle as well as our customers needed was “synchronizing” game data entered in different places and on different computers.   Sure, we had a Backup and Restore feature for moving the full scouting database from one pc to another, but our early windows programs (the 1996, 1998 and 2000 versions) built a very large following among Division II and III coaches, including a few DII national champions in the late 90’s.

It was typical for a college staff to ”split  up” the data entry chore on Sunday afternoon and then consolidate the data at the end of the day to produce a 3, 4 or even 5 game consolidated tendency report.  Easy-Scout included a utility for archiving and moving games around but it took some time to “master”, to say the least.  So when we built Easy-Scout XP, we built data portability right into the software, and its there in a big way in our current products.

We realized that a side benefit of this design was that Easy-Scout was now in a position to have a “Palm” data entry companion, so we built Easy-Scout Mobile for the Pocket PC in 2004 and later Easy-Scout Mobile for Palm computers in 2005.   At the time, there was only one product available to the coach who wanted to use a PDA for entering scouting data on a handheld, and the program ran only on Palm devices.

Easy-Scout Mobile 2005 was released as an optional, add-on, football scouting program for just about any handheld computer a coach might have – Palm, Compaq, HP, Dell, you name it.  To make this simple, we included software for each in the package, so a coach did not need to worry about what type of operating system his “palm pilot” used.  The PDA was optional, so a guy could enter a game or two on his handheld, a game or two on his desktop or laptop, and then combine them to produce a scouting report.  The price… $100. 

The thing about using the PDA is that it makes scouting “mobile”, not just portable. There is a big difference, really, in my opinion.  Back to my building the house analogy, we came out with a new version of Easy-Scout Mobile for Palm computers early this year.  Its better than the previous one, and we did not charge for the update.  

Next up is our “solution” for owners of newer Pocket PC and Windows Mobile devices. The current Easy-Scout Mobile 2005 program (remember we include a Palm and Pocket PC version) works great on Pocket PC’s that run anything other than Windows Mobile 5.  We’ll have one later this Spring for Windows Mobile 5 devices.  It should be the best one yet.  Stay tuned.

Coach Nick

Easy-Scout XP meets Video Editing – from Apple II to Windows Vista

Over twenty years have passed since the first "version" of Easy-Scout – for Apple IIe computers appeared in January 1984. During that time,  Easy-Scout has enabled many High School and College Football Coaches to "delegate" much of the "grunt work" involved in preparing a scouting report to the personal computer

As computer hardware, operating systems and development tools have evolved since the early days of personal computing, Easy-Scout has  done the same. From the early Apple II and IBM PC "DOS" versions, what started out as a text-based, "procedural" program with mainframe style menus and "dot matrix" portrait style tendency reports,  became a "GUI" (graphical user interface) Windows program with drop down menus, toolbars, point and click data entry, and both portrait and landscape reports that use a variety of fonts and formatting to improve readability and reduce paper consumption.

During this 20+ year period, each Easy-Scout "redesign" was done in a way that we felt would minimize the learning curve for those who chose to upgrade.   Each new version too, was priced in line with its predecessors, and upgrades were available at a substantial discount.

The most notable redesigns came in 1992 – our first true database-driven applications and ones that introduced "intelligent defaults" that calculated the Down, Distance and Field Position based on the results of the previous play, 1996 – when we released the first Windows versions of Easy-Scout and Easy-D-Scout, and 2003 when we released a completely redesigned Windows version that was optimized for Windows XP and that combined our previously separate Offensive (Easy-Scout) and Defensive (Easy-D-Scout) programs into a single program – Easy-Scout XP.  The programs were updated routinely and users were only asked to pay for an upgrade when a full redesign was necessary.

Easy-Scout XP really was a huge undertaking, and it took nearly two years of development, testing and fine tuning to get it right.  More than just a combination of the first Windows programs released in the mid 90’s, Easy-Scout XP added quite a bit of new functionality, yet remained affordable by today’s standards.  Consider that in 1984, Easy-Scout was $99 and Easy-D-Scout, released later that year, was also $99.  At the time, like now, they were among the most affordable programs of their kind.

During the Easy-Scout XP development cycle, we began to investigate a variety of ways in which we could incorporate digital video, which was starting to come into its own. We knew that it would soon be time for Easy-Scout to gain video capabilities, but we wanted to make sure we did it in a way that did not compromise its scouting capabilities.

We settled on an approach that, we think, accomplished this goal, enabled us to add what our research told us were the basic, or "fundamental" video functions that our core High School and small college football customers needed and price the program affordably.   Most importantly, we believe our approach makes the program easier to learn and use than any other program of its kind.

Accomplishing these goals required us to identify a number of features to "leave out". Some of the "feature omissions" were clearly bells and whistles;  some unnecessary duplications of functions already included in other programs on the typical Windows PC; and some were expected to apply to only a small fraction of our user community.  A side benefit of this approach is that simple software applications tend to have fewer "bugs" and are easier to maintain.

Just a year after we began shipping Easy-Scout XP, we "broke ground" on Easy-Scout XP Professional, its video enabled "sibling", following the same design principles once again, keeping the essentials, etc.  We also incorporated the "Analyzer" functionality that we released as an optional add-on Easy-Scout XP component in 2004, and of course, video tagging and playback capabilities.

The result, Easy-Scout XP Professional was the first of our applications that was updated specifically to work on Vista. A free trial version of Easy-Scout XP can be downloaded or purchased on CD at a nominal charge.

Welcome to the CompuSports Connection

Welcome to the CompuSports Connection.  This  online journal will contain news, tips and information for users of coaching software published and distributed by CompuSports through www.compusports.com – a football coaching software store and www.coachingware.com – a coaching software store for all coaches.

CompuSports currently publishes three product lines of coaching software: 

Easy-Scout for Football Coaches who want to ”scout” themselves or their opponents and edit digital video
Easy-Recruiter – for coaches and recruiters of any collegiate sport to assist in the management of recruiting data
Easy-Cut for coaches of any sport that want to watch and edit video and produce cutups and highlight tapes

In addition, CompuSports distributes playbook software, sports statistics software, practice planning software and sports equipment inventory management software. 

This blog complements The Coaches Advisor Journal , a similar publication now in its third year, which covers a broad range of topics related to computing and video technologies for coaches.