Today we have upgraded our company website www.pamconsult.com to a complete new design:
This new design fits into our CI that we are applying to all our websites. We hope that every user feels “like home” and knows how to use it when he gets to one of our websites when they all look similar and all navigation elements are at the same place.
Do you like it? Leave a comment…
I’m sure this went mostly unnoticed as Skype 4.x does not show the online users that predominantly anymore – but Skype exceeded the 20 million online users mark a few days ago.
Congratulations to Skype for this achievement (I’m sure many millions will follow!).
Jean-Mercier has an interesting blog site where he grinds the numbers on Skype. You will find information about the online user growth, analysis on the quarterly results numbers and much more. Definitely worth taking a look at http://skypenumerology.blogspot.com
I am proud to announce that we have finally finished our office renovation of the development headquarter in Ebstorf, Germany. Nearly everything is in place again so that we are 100% operational again and can now concentrate on our projects again without being disturbed by the painters or a loud saw etc.
Have a look:
Skype have recently announced that Skype Credit will be phased out in partner applications. This effects the Windows users of PamFax. On December 11, 2009 Skype will shut down Skype Credit payments in any application which uses this. Any (with Skype Credit) purchased PamFax Credit will obviously remain in your account.
As a concequence we will be switching over to an alternative “Pay As You Go” offer which will allow occasional PamFax users to still use PamFax “On Demand” without needing to buy a monthly plan. The minimum initial credit purchase will be €5 (Skype Credit was €0,99). The reason for the €5 amount is the cost associated with processing smaller amounts.
The good news is that PamFax is still the only product which allows you to send faxes by just paying a small pre-load amount.
This update will be done server side and will not require a PamFax update on your computer.
At noon yesterday (Friday), we suddenly had a power outage in the whole office. The fuse always jumped out when we turned on more then 3 PCs or servers. As the painters are still working on painting the rooms, we first suspected them to have done something wrong. But they didn’t. After 2 hours searching for the problem, the electrician arrived and started searching for the problem. All employees went home as there was no work without any power.
At that point you really get hit hard by reality again and that you can’t do anything in our job without internet and power.
After another 2 hours, the electrician found the problem: a new lamp that was just attached the day before in the corridor had some cabling issues that only came out now as the lamp was switched on the whole day and got warm. If we would have not had this lamp on for so long, this problem might have never occurred!
So the guy who attached this lamp will get fired immediately! I will check twice when attaching the next lamp so such a thing could not happen again.
Yes, redecorating the offices can be a fun thing… 
The office improvement goes pretty well. Some rooms look very chaotic and dirty for some time:
We have just updated PamFax in the backend to version 2.0.14 tonight.
This update includes the following changes:
- Improved performance
- Fixed file upload for multiple files
- Added dashboard page in portal
- Improved website
- Optimized transmission reports
- Added “only send notification if an error occurs” setting to notification options
- Fixed relogin issue after sending a fax from Portal
- Group notification checked by default if more then one recipient
- Startup hint “unsent faxes” shows count of faxes, not recipients
- Improved “set password” dialog on first start
- “sent” time is only shown when fax was sent, not while it’s processed
- Improved Facebook and Salesforce.com plugin. i.e. now also show faxes from inbox
Skype has just announced today that the Skype Extras System will not continue. This means no more third-party applications for Skype will be certified and no new extras will be added to the “Tools” -> “Extras” menu in the Skype client. All existing entries will not be removed until the certification period expires. This does not include the Skype Public API which allows third party software to connect to Skype and control some functions and do things like call recording etc. Skype says this API will be maintained in future.
But this shut-down also includes the Skype Credit payment, which will be switched off shortly. No third-party software will then be able to accept Skype Credit payments.
So how does this affect Scendix/PamConsult products? The simple answer is: not very much.
Today we release a Release Candidate version of Pamela Professional 4.6. Release Candidate means that unless we find a serious bug, this version will go live in the next days, replacing Pamela 4.5.
So, what are the big changes? First of all we completely redid the Skype video recording module. This was used a lot in Pamela since introduction in 2006 but since then evolution of the software world has caused more and more issues with it. So we decided to completely re-write the recording part.
We have managed to create a very low resource recording, this is especially critical as any video application already uses considerable resources. We also wanted to make the settings very simple. In Pamela 4.6 you will see only three main settings regarding video. FPS, the captured Frames Per Second. This impacts file size and quality of the video. Then there is the size of the video file (320×200 up to 800×600 including a YouTube setting). This obviously impacts size of the recording too. And then there is the audio quality starting from “low” to “highest”.
The output file is default WMV format and with Pamela 4.6 we’re doing away with all the complex codec configuration.
In addition there is a video custom recording option which will just record anything from the webcam.
If you have Pamela Professional you can just download and install which will update your Pamela to 4.6. If you do not have Pamela Professional or another Pamela version you will have Pamela Professional in trial mode (full functionality for 30 days).
UPDATE: Pamela 4.6 is now released as final version. Download from www.pamela.biz
We just updated the PamFax servers to a new server build (.12). The changes in this release were mainly around time zones, languages and currencies. We’ve had feedback were people had a hard time to set & change the time zone, language and currency in PamFax. So this server release adds a lot of automation. E.g. when you install PamFax for the first time, the system will automatically recognize based on a few factors what country you are in and presets the PamFax settings accordingly. New in this release is that you can change these settings individually in the PamFax portal.
We also did some changes to the website at www.pamfax.biz. New is a twitter feed on the home page as well as some other minor changes.
Detailed changelog:
- Fixed: Empty inbox bug
- Fixed: Error when saving settings containing some special characters
- Fixed: Missing fax-in email notifications
- Fixed: Rounding issue in DRM calculation for Skype payments
- Change: Timezone detection algorithm and date/time formatting routines
- Feature: Added automatic country/timezone/language/currency detection for non-Skype users
- Feature: Change localization settings in portal
Note: No application update is required with this update.
