BenchmarkXPRT Blog banner

Category: TouchXPRT

Five years later…

Five years ago this month, we started what we then called the HDXPRT Development Community. The first benchmark, HDXPRT 2011, appeared six months later. A LOT has happened since then.

We’ve grown to six benchmarks (HDXPRT, TouchXPRT, WebXPRT, MobileXPRT, BatteryXPRT, and CrXPRT) with plenty of updates. As a result, we had to change the name to the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community, though we’ve come to refer to the benchmarks themselves as the XPRTs.

To tell the world about the XPRTs and the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community, we’ve written over 200 blog entries. We’ve created videos, a training course, infographics, and white papers. We’ve met members of the community at their companies, via webinars, and at trade shows. We’ve quite literally traveled around the world to shows in Las Vegas, Barcelona, Taipei, and Shenzhen.

As a result, the community has grown to about 150 individuals at over 60 companies and organizations. People have downloaded or run the benchmarks over 100,000 times in over 44 countries. The XPRTs have been cited over 3,800 times in a wide variety of websites around the world.

Yes, a lot has happened over these five years.

On behalf of the BenchmarkXPRT team, I want to convey my sincere thanks to all of you for your involvement over these years. I’m really looking forward to what the next five years will look like. We’re just getting started!

Things are looking good!

It’s been a couple of weeks since we talked about TouchXPRT 2016. I’m happy to say that we have made great progress since then.

The UI is adapting to the different form factors very well. We’ve tested the resizing on phones and on tablets with the screen snapped to half and quarter screen. While a couple of UI elements still need work, we’ve had no problems running the tests. Here’s how TouchXPRT looks on a phone:

Phone 1     Phone 2

We have also greatly simplified installing the application on phones, so we’re no longer concerned about that.

All in all, things are looking good for releasing the community preview soon. However, we’re going to wait until we can test on the Windows 10 Fall Update (Threshold Build 2).  That’s supposed to be released on November 2. We’re not expecting any problems with the Fall Update, but it’s always to wise to check.

November can’t come quickly enough!

Eric

An update on TouchXPRT 2016

We’ll be releasing the MobileXPRT 2015 white paper tomorrow. It contains lots of information about MobileXPRT 2015 that you won’t find anywhere else. We hope you’ll find it very informative.

A couple of weeks ago, we released the design document for TouchXPRT 2016 (login required). This week, we put the first build of TouchXPRT 2016 into testing. It’s a Universal Windows app that runs on Windows 10 tablets, PCs, and phones. This means that TouchXPRT can now run on a wider variety of devices. However, it also means that TouchXPRT 2016 will not be backward compatible with Windows 8 and 8.1.

Given the current state of the SDKs, installing the test builds on phones is more complicated than we would like. We’re looking into ways to simplify the install before releasing the community preview. Testing on phones is particularly important because we made many of the UI changes to enable TouchXPRT to work acceptably on a small display.

We’ll keep you informed as testing proceeds. We’re hoping to release the community preview in the next couple of weeks.

Eric

MobileXPRT 2015 source code and TouchXPRT 2016 Design Overview are available

We’re excited to announce that the MobileXPRT 2015 source code and TouchXPRT 2016 Design Overview are now available to community members!

Download the MobileXPRT 2015 source here (login required).

Download the MobileXPRT 2015 build instructions here (login required).

Download the TouchXPRT 2016 Design Overview here (login required).

We also posted links to all three items on the MobileXPRT and TouchXPRT tabs in the Members’ Area.

If you want more information, please contact BenchmarkXPRTsupport@principledtechnologies.com.

We look forward to your feedback!

The benefits of membership

We have a couple of goodies for community members coming tomorrow.

The TouchXPRT 2016 design overview will tell you what we’re planning for the upcoming community preview. Thanks to everyone who’s contributed ideas. Let us know if the design overview omits anything you’d like to see in the benchmark.

The MobileXPRT 2015 source code and the instructions for building MobileXPRT 2015 will be available as well. Community members have access to the source for all the XPRT benchmarks. Making the source available is a pillar of the community model.

Look for the design overview and source code in the members’ area.

If you aren’t yet a member, this is a great time to join!

Eric

Upping our game

As we wrote last week, we’re releasing MobileXPRT 2015 to the public tomorrow. Thanks to everyone who helped make the community preview a success!

We’re working on the TouchXPRT 2016 design document and will make it available for the community to review soon.

As you know, we’re always investigating initiatives that could improve our game. We’re continuing to investigate creating experimental tests for future XPRTs. Experimental tests will allow us to maintain broad compatibility for each XPRT tool while providing testers with an opportunity to evaluate cutting-edge technologies.

Another initiative involves looking for new partnerships with people who are not yet part of the community, but could add valuable input to the development process. It’s too soon to say much more about this, but we’re having fruitful conversations and hoping that these partnerships will grow the community even more!

If you have ideas about experimental tests, improving the XPRTs, or expanding the community, please let us know.

Eric

Check out the other XPRTs:

Forgot your password?