We’ve been analysing the UK political news and Twittersphere as part of a project for the New Statesman, and for a bit of fun we decided to see what else we could do with the numbers.

There’s an excellent Python library called the Natural Language Toolkit, which includes a function for generating text based on word-frequency analysis, so we decided to see what would happen if we hooked it up to code that reads the UK’s newspapers. We discovered we’d created a monster!

We’ve named it REABot, for the Resolver Electoral Analysis Robot, and you can read its political musings here. So far, it’s treated us to an overview of the electoral campaign so far, and profiles of the leaders of the three main political parties: Gordon Brown, David Cameron, and Nick Clegg. It also makes occasional appearances on Twitter.

Have you thought about getting an unrestricted version of Resolver One, but decided against because it was beyond your budget?

On 31 March, for one day only, we are selling full commercial licenses for Resolver One 1.8 for $40 — for people in the European Union, that’s still only $47.60 including taxes — and for people everywhere else, and VAT-registered EU companies, it’s $40, tax-free! This is the full version of the software, with online support and upgrades up to and including version 2.0.

You can buy Resolver One here.

We’re happy to announce the release of Resolver One 1.8! As always, you can download it here.

The big news in version 1.8 is that it supports IronPython 2.6. This not only supports the improved Python 2.6 syntax, but also adds some significant performance improvements, and makes the whole application much “snappier”. It’s well worth trying just for that, but we’ve also added a bunch of other useful features:

• A new workbook property RecalculateAfter, which if set in user code triggers another recalculation after the given number of seconds.
• Support for new statistics functions: NORMDIST, NORMSDIST, ERF and ERFC.
• A new GetExternalWorkbook function to import Microsoft Excel .xls files from user code.
• Various other functions that we were missing for compatibility with other spreadsheet applications.
• And, of course, a number of bugfixes and performance enhancements.

If you want more details, here is a full list of every change in this release.

Don’t forget, we have forums to discuss and ask questions about Resolver One, and there is detailed documentation too.

We’ve just released version 1.7 of Resolver One. This version has three major enhancements:

• Button-click handlers are now executed without blocking the rest of Resolver One. This means that if you accidentally write a handler that never finishes, or just one that takes longer than you want, you can cancel it while it’s running and fix the problem.
• We’ve added a dialog for setting wrapping and aligment for cells.
• External imported modules now shared between documents and RunWorkbook (which gives much better performance for RunWorkbook).

Here’s the full list of changes — and, of course, you can download it from here.

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, one of the world’s leading professional societies for the engineering and technology community, has shortlisted Resolver One as one of the finalists for its Innovation Awards 2009.  Winners will be announced on 25 November.