We are excited to announce official Quirkos support for Linux! This is something we have been working on for some time, and have been really encouraged by user demand to support this Free and Open Source (FOSS) platform. Quirkos on Linux is identical to the Windows and Mac versions, with the same graphical interface, feature set and file format, so there are no issues working across platforms.

Currently we are only offering a script based installer, which can be downloaded from the main download page. In the future we may try and offer some packaged based deb or rpm downloads, but for the moment there are two practical reasons this is not feasible. First, it is much easier for us to provide one installer that should work on all distributions, regardless of what package manager is utilised. Secondly, Quirkos is build using the latest version of Qt (5.5) which is not yet supported in most stable distributions yet. This would either lead to dependency hell, or users having to install Qt5.5 libraries manually (which actually take up a lot of space, and are themselves based around a script based installer). However, we will revisit this in the future if there is sufficient demand.

Most dependencies can be solved by installing qt5 from your repository, although most KDE desktops will already have many of the required packages.

Once downloaded, you must make the installer file executable. There are two ways to do this, either by running “chmod +x  quirkos-1.3-linux-installer.run” from the shell in the directory containing the installer, or an alternative GUI based method in Gnome is to right click on the file in the Nautilus file browser, select the properties tab, and then tick the 'Allow executing file as program' box.

Once you've done this, either double click on the file, or run in the bash terminal with “./quirkos-1.3-linux-installer.run”. Of course, if you want to install to a system wide folder (such as /opt/bin) you should run the installer with root permissions. By default Quirkos will install in the user's home folder, although this can be changed during the install process. An uninstaller is also created, but all files are contained in the root Quirkos folder, so deleting the folder will remove everything from your system. After installing, a shortcut will be created on the desktop (on Ubuntu systems) which can be used to run Quirkos, or dragging the icon to the Unity side-bar will keep the launcher in an accessible place. Otherwise, run the Quirkos.sh file in the Quirkos folder to start the application.

If you are looking for FOSS software for qualitative research, try RQDA, an extension for the versatile R statistical package, an open source alternative to SPSS. There is also Weft QDA, although this doesn't seem to have been updated since 2006. It's worth noting that both have fairly obtuse interfaces, and are not well suited for beginners!

We have tested Quirkos on numerous different systems, but obviously we can't check all iterations. So if you have any problems or issues, PLEASE let us know, this is new ground for us, and indeed is the first 'mainstream' qualitative analysis software to be offered for Linux. In fact, tell us if it all works fine as well – the more we hear people are using Quirkos on Linux, the better!

We are proud to announce a significant update for Quirkos, that adds significant new features, improves performance, and provides a fresh new look. Major changes include:

• PDF import
• Greater ability to work with Levels to group and explore themes
• Improved performance when working with large projects
• New report generation and styling
• Ability to copy and paste quotes directly from search and hierarchy views
• Improved CSV export
• New tree-hierarchy view for Quirks
• Numerous bug fixes
• Cleaner visual look

We’ve made a few tweaks to the way Quirkos looks, tidying up dialogue boxes and improving the general style and visibility, but maintaining the same layout, so there is nothing out of place for experienced users.

There is once again no change to Quirkos project files, so all versions of Quirkos can talk to each other with no issues, and there is no need to do anything to your files – just keep working with your qualitative data. The update is free for all paid users, and a simple process to install. Just download the latest version, install to the same directory as the last release, and the new version will replace the old. There is no need to update the licence code, and we would recommend all users to move to the new version as soon as they can to take advantage of the improvements!

Lots of people have requested PDF support, so that users can add journal articles and PDF reports into Quirkos, and we are happy to say this is now enabled. Please note that at the moment PDF support is limited to text only – some PDF files, especially from older journals that have been scanned in are not actually stored as text, but as a scanned image of text. Quirkos can’t read the text from these PDFs, and you will usually need to use OCR (optical character recognition) software to convert these (included in some professional editions of Acrobat Reader for example).

We have always supported ‘Levels’ in Quirkos, a way to group Quirks that can work across hierarchical groupings and parent-child relationships. Many people desired to work with categories in this way, so we have improved the ways you can work with levels. They are now a refinable category in search results and queries, allowing you to generate a report containing data refined by level, and a whole extra dimension to group your qualitative themes.

Reports have been completely revamped to improve how you share qualitative data, with better images, and a simpler layout. There are now many more options for showing the properties belonging to each quote, streamlined and grouped section headings, better display of hierarchial groupings, and a much more polished, professional look. As always, our reports can be shared as PDF, interactive HTML, or customised using basic CSS and Javascript.

Although the canvas view with distinctive topic bubbles is a distinguishing feature in Quirkos, we know some people prefer to work with a more traditional tree hierarchy view. We’ve taken on board a lot of feedback, and reworked the ‘luggage label’ view to a tree structure, so that it works better with large numbers of nodes. The hierarchy of grouped codes in this view has also been made clearer.

There are also numerous bug fixes and performance improvements, fixing some issues with activation, improving the speed when working with large sources, and some dialogue improvements to the properties editor on OS X.

We are also excited to launch our first release for Linux! Just like all the other platforms, the functionality, interface and project files are identical, so you can work across platforms with ease. There will be a separate blog post article about Quirkos on Linux tomorrow.

We are really excited about the improvements in the new version, so download it today, and let us know if you have any other suggestions or feedback. Nearly all of the features we have added have come from suggestions made by users, so keep giving us your feedback, and we will try and add your dream features to the next version...

Judging by the buzz and article sharing going on last week, there was a lot of interest and worry about Microsoft launching their own market research platform. Branded as part of ‘Bing’, their offering, called ‘Pulse’ has actually been around for a while, and is still geared around collecting feedback from live events, especially political discussions.

I can see why this move might have a lot of companies worried, it seems to me that the market research arena is crowded with start-ups and established firms offering platforms, or ‘communities’ for collecting participant data. There’s LiveMinds, Aha!, VisionLive, a quick search will bring up dozens of competitors. So an entry into the market from an organisation with deep pockets and brand awareness like Microsoft may well have many looking to see how this develops. However, with my own limited time with Pulse, I don’t think there is much to worry about yet.

First of all, Pulse is currently entirely focused on one niche, feedback on live events. There are no tools to do anything like advert or creatives validation, no proper survey tools or interactive online focus groups. The MO is very much quantitatively focused, with very little option to capture qualitative feedback at this time. Secondly, it seems to have a lot of limitations, and in this beta state, almost no documentation.

I quickly got stuck trying to create a real-time voting question, with a mandatory box for ‘response theme’ that was greyed out, but wouldn’t continue without being completed. The ‘help’ tools just link to a generic Bing help website, which don’t contain any content about Pulse. The layout is a little confusing, getting you stuck in a strange loop between the ‘Live Dashboard’ and ‘Pulse Options’, and it’s also slow: get used to seeing the little flapping loading logo after every action.

As for integration, the only option at the moment seems to be the API, which only has four available calls. There doesn’t seem to be any way to get results (especially those not covered by those API calls) out from the platform: I can’t see any CSV export or the like. Also, considering the powerful analytic options available through the Azure platform, it’s disappointing not to see any easy integration there. In short, far from being a quick DIY solution, you will need someone to programme yet another API into your platform to do anything more than look at a few graphs on the Pulse platform.

I want to stress that this was hardly a detailed review and test of the capabilities of the platform, my opinions are based just on playing with it for an hour or so. However, it is nice to be able to try it out with just a registration, personally I don’t like products where the demo is locked away and difficult to try out. It’s a competitive market, and I feel more inclined to trust software that the developers aren’t shy of showing off!

Now, I understand that most market research providers are not so much worried about the current feature set of Pulse, but what this entry into the field means in the future, especially for a product that Microsoft is content to offer for free at this time. But I would echo some of the comments made in the Greenbook article by Leonard Murphy, that it usually doesn’t make sense for market research firms to do their own their own quantitative data collection. The future, he says, is integrating with data collection tools and adding value in terms of insight, custom development and consultation.

And that is the crux with all these market research platforms: they are primarily data collection tools, with limited analytics. Pulse doesn’t seem to have anything on this front at the moment, but with too many of these solutions, the insight stops with a couple of graphs or statistics. I feel there is still the need to integrate with another tool, or draw from extensive market research analytic experience to make anything from the data once it has been collected. It maybe that most clients don’t expect or require any kind of rigour in the breakdown of project results, especially when it comes to qualitative data. I am still yet to see anything that looks to me like a true end-to-end platform for market research, but am willing to be proved wrong!

At the moment, there are some great and flexible tools for collecting customer data online, be it quantitative or qualitative. But these are ubiquitous, and very cheap to run – we host an online survey platform for our customers for free, just as a convenience. Yet getting to answers and insight from that data usually requires an additional analytical step, especially for qualitative research. As I’ve said before,  the most difficult step is understanding the data and how you integrate analytics into your workflow. Increasingly the data collection platform you choose, and how much you pay for it will not be an issue.