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.