Fast Model Sports Technology

At Fast Model Technologies, we’ve been spending the offseason reorganizing our product and customer service levels in order to streamline our ability to support our wide customer base. These changes go into effect on July 11, 2011 and coincide with our FastDraw and FastScout 4.0 updates. You can learn more about the new product and customer service levels here.

Upgrade Instructions
 

All versions of FastDraw (Basic and Advanced) now support the following great new features:

1.       Editable Frame Labels: You now have the ability edit an individual frame’s label. This is a great way to add further detail to your playbook printouts. To edit a frame’s label, double-click on the frame label in the upper-left hand corner of the frame you want to modify.

You will get a popup that lets you set the title. If you ever need to set a label back to its default (e.g. “Frame 2”) you can just double click on the frame label and then erase the label before pressing OK.

 

 

We’ve added a new setting to the Preview/Print Settings area that will allow you to make use of these custom frame labels in your printouts. When the option “Use Custom Label as Play Name” is checked, FastDraw will replace the frame’s play name with an overridden label when one exists. If the playbook you are printing has no frames with customized labels, the play name references in your print out will be unaffected. By default, this option has been turned on for all previously created playbooks. See the screenshot below for an example of how this setting works.

2.       Revert Frame/ Revert Play: To help you recover from changes (accidental or not) you’ve made to an existing play or frame that you do not want to keep, FastDraw 4.0 now supports a Revert Play and a Revert Frame command. The Revert Play command works by restoring ALL of the frames of the currently selected play and its accompanying data (e.g. play name) back to the original state of when the play was first selected for editing (i.e. when it was selected in the play library). The Revert Frame command works in similar fashion by restoring the contents of the selected frame back to the original state of when the frame was last selected for editing (e.g. clicking on frame 2). Both commands are available in the frame’s right-click context menu.

Note: Once you’ve “switched off” the current play or frame, the respective contents can no longer be reverted; therefore it is important to use the revert commands as soon as you realize you need to restart from the original copy.

3.       New Out of Bounds Options: We’ve improved upon the concept of out of bounds plays by providing you with additional options that will help keep the size of the printed out of bounds diagrams more consistent with the rest of the “normal” plays in your playbook. You can now decide on specifically which out of bounds areas to include on a per frame (or play) basis. You can tell by the screenshot below how much better out of bounds play now look when mixed with non-out of bounds plays. (We’ve also been working on improving the consistency of frame heights when printing in general)

4.       Message Ticker: At Fast Model, we’re always looking for ways to better interact with our customers and to keep them informed. Beginning with 4.0, all our applications now support a message ticker at the bottom of the program. Please pay attention to this area as we’ll be relying on this communication platform heavily from now on. If there are multiple messages available, the program will cycle through them every few seconds. If there are no message, the ticker will simply not appear. 

Note: the system only checks for new messages on startup, so be sure to restart your application at least every few days.

In addition to the features mentioned already, users of the Advanced version of FastDraw will also receive the following enhancements with the upgrade to 4.0.

1.       FastAdd/FastMotion: For users that find themselves drawing A LOT of diagrams (e.g. Advance Scouts), we’ve added a new way to draw plays that mimics how a person would draw using a pad and pencil. There are two pieces to this enhancement. FastAdd accelerates the process of putting players on the court by allowing you to click directly on the court where you want to place them and assigning possession at the same time. Once you have your players in the correct location, you can use FastMotion to quickly draw their assignments using an intuitive free-hand based motion. As part of the process, you can very easily change the stencil type between dribbles, passes, etc. This new method of diagramming will take a little getting used to, but we’re certain that once you get the hang of it, you will find that it is a tremendous time saver. And remember, if there are times where the traditional method of FastDraw works better for you, the original method is always available, too. Click here to see a video demonstration of FastAdd/FastMotion.

 

2.       Undo/Redo: In addition to the Revert Play and Revert Frame commands discussed earlier, Advanced users have a more granular Undo/Redo capability that lets them undo/redo just the most recent set of changes to a diagram (versus having to revert all the way to the beginning). For example, if you are almost finished drawing a new play but make a mistake on the most recently cut, you can use the Undo command to go back one step so that you can redraw the cut. Both the Undo and Redo commands are available as right-click menu options.

3.       Compact Mode: A lot of our advanced customers refer to their video editing system when diagramming. To make it easier to work simultaneously in FastDraw and with your video, we’ve introduced a new Compact Mode that can be used to minimize the amount of real-estate FastDraw needs when drawing plays.
 

You can toggle between Compact Mode and normal mode by using the Compact Mode button to enter this new mode and using the Restore link in the upper right-hand corner to restore back to full-view. For those that are creating plays as you watch video, you can even use the New Play link to create a new play without having to exit compact mode.