By Bernard Maldonado
The new release of the Solona Automation Tool is available. This release is compatible with Internet Explorer 8. To get the new tool, simply login to your Solona.net account. There is a link at the top of the users page. Be sure to move or delete any old version of the Solona Tool.
The big fix is that a user can now change the hot key and the program will remember that change. This is good for Window Eyes users. The issue of finding the icon in the system tray is still up in the air. Jaws users – please continue to use Windows + B to navigate to the tool in the system tray to change any configuration. This will be corrected in the next version.
IE 8 Users. Please pay attention. There is a known bug in this release for IE 8 users. Please pay attention. There are certain websites that do not work with the tool. The symptom is that you will not hear the camera snap sound when you invoke the hot key. The tool goes into an infinite loop of screen captures and you will have to manually escape to stop it. That image won’t work for Solona. It’s possible that you will never find such a site, but it is a known issue.
There is no known pattern yet for which sites work and which ones don’t. So far, I know that IBM.com, sun.com, cisco.com do not work. Honestly, you may never encounter a faulty site. However, I feel it necessary to mention this bug in full disclosure. Please let us know about a site that you may find that does not work
This is a very strange phenomena, and we are working to solve this issue. I can tell you that IE 8 is just a different animal and it will take some trial and error testing to get this bug ironed out. The programmer and I worked for several days to fix this issue, but realized that it would take more time.
Having said that, we all believe that this tool is an improvement over the first version in spite of the known bug. The benefits outweigh the known issues. The Solona Steering Committee believes that it was better to release this tool now rather than wait for the known issue to be resolved.
The third release will be released as soon as it is stable and addresses the random site issues.
The new tool is located in the page that you see after logging into Solona. So just login to your account to retrieve it.
Please leave comments about this tool so that Solona can be a better service.
Thank you again to the Solona Steering Committee for helping to release this tool. It is a definite improvement and keep in mind that more automation is to come for Solona.
Bernard.
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