Paper printouts on races are not dead yet - all events are not with thousands of runners and you still like to provide a professional-looking result book to the organizers.

So here's another round of improvements coming soon, to empower the use of customized report templates.

Among a lot of details fixed, the most important changes are the following:

• new design for the management form, with a better access to the item list and a dedicated panel for the general properties
• new ability to define Left and Right margins
• new item kind - shapes: bringing the ability to draw various rectangles or lines, with access to the background color and some border options
• items are now resizable with mouse on the preview
• text items have new properties: auto-size or not, horizontal and vertical alignment, vertical text and font family selection
• new variables available to include into texts
• the list of data columns saved with the template is now visible

Giving that in picture. This sample will be available for selection in the next release so you'll be free to use it in a click or to upgrade it with a race logo for example. And you can notice by the way the new PDF button in the ribbon to make your pdf documents in a click.

Let's introduce this useful tip:

You already know how to import participant and result data, through the powerful file import wizard. But did you know you can simply paste some data when working on the grids?

You sometimes have an Excel sheet already open with some participant lists, for example. Want to import them in your Wiclax event? Means opening the file import dialog for participants, and then lookup for the file through the Explorer. Great, but you can do quicker by copying the original list into the clipboard, and then simply pressing the usual Control+V shortcut after you put the focus on the competitors grid. That will show up the filedata import wizard, with the Import from clipboard option checked. And from that point you know how to proceed.

And this way is not only quicker, it's also a necessary helper when you want to import only a selection of what's in the original file.

Last thing to say, it can as well be used to move some participant/result data from a Wiclax event to another, selecting them and playing with the Control+C and Control+V shortcuts.

Starting to give a flavour of the new features already implemented, but not yet in a public release. So that you can wait for them, and give us a feedback in between.

Focusing this one today: if you are a user of Australian RFID Timing systems as we do, you will soon enjoy this new layout for your acquisitions. Not taking more place, the row will show up with the device's battery level, the visualization of the active antennas, the readers current mode, the power of each reader and the reading ON/OFF status.

Here's the picture:

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.

See the full list of new stuff here.

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:

1. Feed the list of events to work on. These will be the .clax files you used to time them.
2. 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.