As we get closer to our product launches, we know there’s a considerable demand for easy access to technical support. As such, we’re opening a temporary help desk to be used until our internally-developed customer center is ready to go live. You can now use this help desk for any questions or support requests for our products and services.

Visit Our Help Desk

NextShout is a product that has been in development for a while now and is getting extremely close to its release date. We want to give the world an early shot at it for a reduced price. NextShout will be $20 on its release date for a 1-year license to the software. After the year is up, in order to receive updates, you will need to renew your license for $10. If you Pre-Order between now and the release, you’ll get NextShout for only $15.

Visit NextShout’s Product Page for more information.

Omega Vortex has been going through some behind-the-scenes changes in the midst of all that has been going on, lately. Our consulting division is busy and our software development is going strong. ComicShout, OmegaVerge, OmegaFlash, and a new product that we haven’t announced yet, will all be releasing within the coming months. With this news, I’m also going to detail some exciting changes to our overall operations and staffing.

Omega Vortex was officially incorporated in Colorado in September of last year. We haven’t had a real “offical” board of directors up to this point, just me as Founder and C.E.O. During the transition period over the next few months, I will be leaving the position of C.E.O. as we start to welcome our new board of directors. I will be taking the position of Chairman and someone else will become the company C.E.O. I have a knack for business and I’ve done really well without any formal education in it, but we will be bringing in some people who are a bit more knowledgable in topics that I’m lacking experience in. Make no mistake, I’m still calling the shots and Omega Vortex will proceed forward utilizing my vision, we’re just bringing in people who have more formal knowledge at running a business. My “official” title will become “Chief Software Architect”. While I will be Chairman, I will mostly be over the Software and Consulting divisions, as well as keeping my eye on overall operations. Staying as the C.S.A. allows me to specify my intent with what I wish to continue to do with this company. We will be announcing the new C.E.O. soon.

A few more internal position changes that you should be aware of include some promotions of current staff. Steven Harris, who is currently the Software Division Manager, is going to become our Chief Technology Officer. Steven will work with the Chief Software Architect in deciding the appropriate technologies to use in our product and service offerings, as well as be the head over certain divisions Omega Vortex will be opening in the future. A new Software Division Manager will be appointed when it’s deemed appropriate to do so. Derek Privett will become our new Computers Division Manager, taking over where Thomas Warnica left off. Thomas is still with us at Omega Vortex, but he’s stepping down due to personal reasons.

With all that said, we’re hiring! If you’re interested in joining our software development team or getting in on our consulting action (we don’t outsource — only Omega Vortex employees work on Omega Vortex Consulting Projects), e-mail us at jobs -at- omegavortex -dot- net and include your resume. We’ll get back to you and set up an interview, if we think you’re a good fit.

Omega Vortex is in immediate need of two or three developers for a project that we’re working on. It’ll be a temporary position with a possibility of full-time employment. Check out our job openings and if you think you qualify, please send us a resume to jobs -at- omegavortex -dot- net.

Omega Vortex recently acquired ComicShout, a Web Comic Publishing Solution, that was originally developed by Aaron Robbins. As noted on ComicShout’s website, Aaron no longer has the time to continue with the project. Omega Vortex has picked up development of the application and we will be open sourcing it. The project has already been approved at SourceForge and we’ll be migrating the code in, shortly.

Our first priority is getting the security issues cleaned up and releasing an update. After that, we’ll talk about new features. As with all of our open source offerings, we only use SourceForge as a means to host the code in a public repository. Software information and downloads will be available at our website.

We will let everyone know when the update is ready. We’re expecting it to be within two weeks.

We’ve got a ton of stuff to tell you about. This is going to be a collective update of everything that’s been going on since the beginning of this year. Before we get into that, Omega Vortex is hiring! Check out our list of openings and contact us with your resume and a list of references if you think you would fit in any of those positions.

For those of you who do not know, Omega Vortex is still very much in the startup stages of its life-cycle. While we’re busy developing our products and services, we do still have to make money and pay our employees. We do this through our Consulting Services. Our consulting service is a high-quality, professional way to get any web development or design work you need done. Our policies are optimized to bring superior value to our clients and allow us to take on many clients at once, without overload and impeding the work for any of our clients, and still allow our Software Engineers time to work on our own product line. If you or anyone you know needs any web development or design work done, contact us and tell us what you need.

Without further ado, let’s get into our updates …  Read the rest of this entry »

Due to popular demand, we’ve also decided to make Wordpress “converge-ready” — If you want to use IP.Converge with Wordpress, this is the solution for you.

We’re also going to be making one more piece of software “converge-ready” for this release. It’s mostly for our purposes, as we doubt that it’ll be in high-demand. We’ll see what happens, though.

More to come soon …

Omega Vortex is currently looking for volunteers to aid in the testing of specific features in some of its upcoming products and solutions. If you’re interested in what we’re up to and want to help us out through the means of testing some of our work, please send an e-mail to jobs - at - omegavortex - dot - net.

You may be asked to sign an NDA, so if you’re not of legal age to sign such documents, you need to ensure that your parent or legal guardian will be able and willing to sign with you. No previous experience testing is required, but applicants will be filtered by whatever technical knowledge and previous experience that they might have.

We believe we have some very innovative ideas that will change the way you work and expect to work with web-based software. If you want to be a part of that, please don’t hesitate to sign up now!

Due to extremely popular demand and because one of our clients needs their Joomla installation to be “converge-ready”, I’ve started work on an abstraction layer to easily make applications “Convergable” … The initial layer will support Joomla 1.5 with other applications to follow.

We will be charging for the package, but one purchase will include all current and future converge modules that will go into the layer. Prices to be determined.

IP.Converge is a product from Invision Power Services that will allow “converge-ready” applications to share member information. Member data is synchronized into the converge application and then propagated between the remote applications so that your user account data will work on all applications within that converge pool from a single registration.

More information will be available soon.

One of the things I mentioned in one of my previous entries was that our “under the hood” pieces were going to be utilizing features in PHP 5.3. One of those pieces is Omen. Omen is short for “Omega Engine” and is a re-birth of the Engine, from days gone by. Due to advances in technology and the feature set that we can draw from in our choice to use PHP 5.3 as the minimum version, Omen is being written from scratch to account for everything that’s changed since the Engine’s original inception.

I’ve learned quite a lot since the Engine was originally put together, and I’m intending to use what I’ve learned to make our software framework even better than before. We’re also taking API documentation very seriously, as we intend to release Omen’s API documentation that will be built utilizing phpDocumentor and our very strict code commenting standards. While we’re firm believers in Open Source and support Open Source projects as well as developing our own, I personally believe that we should also have our own proprietary solutions that we can stand firmly upon. Omen will be utilized by 3rd Party developers through our various distributed products, but it will be one of the few pieces of our products that will be encoded. Hence the obvious need for API Documentation.

I hope everyone can understand the need for this protection. Omen will be at the very core of all of our non-FOSS products and all of our hosted solutions and applications. Let me take a moment to highlight some of the features that will be available in the first version of Omen:

• Advanced Error Handling classes that standardize all error displays that bubble up to the end-user. Also supports the conversion of all PHP Errors enabled in error_reporting to Exceptions. Omen will ship with three error renderers, as well. A normal HTML Renderer, a CLI-based Renderer, and an XML-based Renderer for Web Services.
• Omen is at the root of our Configuration Management.
• First version includes basic Diagnostic tools such as timers for microbenchmarks and a memory profiler.
• Omen is also at the heart of our web application security, containing a Sanitization component which handles our protections against various types of attacks.
• Omen includes a module for standardizing access to MySQL Databases, but we intend to eventually migrate to a full Data Access Layer within the framework.
• Omen standardizes interfaces to various forms of Encoding and Encryption as well as making it easy to support the Encoding and Salting methods of other software’s password hashing, allowing us to make it possible to port your users’ passwords as well if you migrate to our software from elsewhere.
• Compression and Decompression of Tar/Gzip/Bzip and the Compression (and soon to be Decompression) of Zip archives for packaging purposes.
• Support for FTP that’s not dependent on PHP’s ftp functions, but utilizes them if they’re available.

And that just scratches the very surface of what Omen’s capable of in this first iteration. You’ll see a ton of new things added to Omen as time goes on, so stay tuned.