Norwich, England. 1st June 2009. The first beta preview of Evagene Clinical, Beta 1, was made available on the 1st of April 2009 and the response from the public test programme surpassed all expectations, praising the innovative approach to pedigree drawing, ease of use, flexibility and reliability. Since then, not a day has passed without improvements being made in preparation for the second public preview, Evagene Clinical Beta 2.

Key improvements, based on in-house testing and external requests, bring a complete redesign of the printing process including powerful page-spanning control, more intuitive ways to select data and edit data, Quick-Click short-cuts to create pedigrees quicker than ever before and advanced routines to improve the layout of family tree diagrams as you draw them. Form-based entry allows you to complete family history forms to generate pedigrees, without needing Evagene Clinical installed.

All in all, more than 150 new features and fixes have been put in place to make Evagene Clinical Beta 2 a more complete solution to your pedigree drawing, management and analysis needs.

The first release of Evagene Clinical Beta 1 is due to expire at the end of June 2009 and the only way to continue using the unique, advanced features is to upgrade to the latest release.

New Features and Major Improvements

Printing
Printing in Evagene Clinical Beta 1 was described as "good enough" - hardly the endorsement we intended. The only way to bring the quality, flexibility and usability our users desired was to completely scrap our printing routines and start again, from a blank sheet. By modelling our printing capabilities on the world's leading document creation and management software, Evagene Clinical Beta 2 now offers improved printing detail, performance and control, allowing you to span pages and visualise the final product before printing.

Quick-Click
There are now even more ways to use Evagene Clinical to draw pedigrees. As well as the unique and intuitive Evagene Natural Pedigree Drawing, we bring you Quick-Click. As its name suggest, Quick-Click allows you to draw and extend family trees with a single mouse click - add a spouse, parents or offspring by pressing an Quick-Click button and Evagene will arrange the new symbols on your pedigree in the optimal layout. Alternatively, you may simply drag Quick-Click icons onto your pedigree so you don't even need to set your individual selections first. Quick-Click is a simple, rapid means to create stunning pedigree drawings in seconds.

Form-Based Data Entry
Evagene Clinical now offers users the ability to create pedigrees by filling in a pre-made Patient History form on any computer with Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 installed. Designed to follow commonly-used patient case forms, a freely-distributable Microsoft Office template may be used to capture entire pedigrees, including disease and ethnicity information, to be loaded directly into Evagene. This time-saving feat permits clinicians on the road to rapidly and unobtrusively note down the details of a patient's family, prompting all the necessary questions to ensure a sufficient information is captured. Forms can then be loaded directly into Evagene, stored electronically or printed and filed conventionally.

Presentation
Spend less time fiddling with your pedigrees now that Evagene Clinical offers an invisible grid, snapping symbols into place to keep them aligned and tidy. The newest release of Evagene Clinical offers greater control of which data to display and how to format it, with any information, including user-defined fields, capable of being rendered on the pedigree, anchored above, below or across symbols. Improved previewing makes this feature even more accessible.

Usability
People upgrading from legacy pedigree drawing software asked if Evagene could lay out pedigrees for them, shuffling symbols out of the way automatically to make space for new individuals and relationships. This new feature of Evagene Clinical Beta 2 reduces the effort required to create great-looking presentations and pedigree diagrams.

Perhaps the most divisive feature of Evagene Clinical's first preview was the novel approach to selecting multiple symbols - toggling selection rather than replacing selection. While this invention permits keyboardless operation, it is unfamiliar and a number of users prefer the established "shift-click" extended selection, ubiquitous in many software products. Evagene Clinical Beta 2 now satisfies both camps by defaulting to the traditional shift-click methodology but, by choosing the appropriate selection mode icon, can alternatively follow the toggle-selection way of working. Furthermore, the selection in the pedigree drawing is now mirrored in the table view and vice versa, helping you to edit and study the pedigree however you prefer to work.

Annotations are now easier to delete - as well as scribbling them out, you can now simply hit the delete key. Clever algorithms detect if you are editing the text content or removing the annotation from the diagram.

Clipboard operations, such as cut and paste, are now shared between all open pedigrees making data and diagram replication even more straightforward. Operations which give no obvious user feedback, such as resaving the pedigree, are now reported unobtrusively as notifications.

Configuration
As well as a range of improved default values, including generating sensible identities for new manifestations, pregnancies, eggs and marriages, Evagene Clinical now offers an intelligent field to record an individual's age. Enter the age directly or have it calculated from the date of birth, based on the date represented by the pedigree or a date of death.

Community
The Evagene Clinical community and knowledge base are now live and will grow over the coming days, weeks and months. Right now, the Evagene Community offers a forum to share species and study data as well as discuss how to get the most out of you pedigree software and seek technical assistance. Watch this space as a host of extended features and services become available to increase the usefulness of Evagene Clinical and save you time and assist your clinical decisions.

Evagene Clinical Beta 2 can be downloaded today for free from http://www.evagene.com/Download.aspx 
 

About Xiasma
Xiasma, based in the heart of Norwich in the United Kingdom, has been developing bespoke software and providing premium IT consultancy since 2002. As a Microsoft Partner and a Centre of Excellence for .Net and Delphi solutions, Xiasma has earned a reputation for delivering on time and on budget to the world's largest and best known companies as well as SMEs and startups within a broad portfolio of industries.

For media enquiries, please contact
Maria Anastasi
+44 (0) 87 1234 4992
press@evagene.com