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Showing posts with label HyperStudio. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HyperStudio. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

HyperStudio is Back!!!!

An old friend is back in the classroom!!

HyperStudio is a program that has enabled students to share their ideas, thoughts and creations through a multimedia for many years. I have had the good fortune to use it with students in my classrooms and share it with educators on 3 continents.

Unfortunately, this wonderful program was sold to Learning.com in 1999 which resulted in a series of flawed updates. Eventually, this lead to the program disappearing from the educational scene about 5 years ago. The originator, Roger Wagner, bought back the rights a few years ago and enlisted MacKiev to completely reprogram the product. The new product was announced at the 2007 NECC in Atlanta but it never shipped. MacKiev showed it again at the San Antonio NECC in 2008 and it began shipping earlier this year. HyperStudio is BACK!!!

I must admit that I haven't had the opportunity to thoroughly examine the new version, but I liked what I saw at NECC. HyperStudio now has the capability to export to self-contained programs, webpages, podcasts and even iPhones. It is fully integrated to share media with iTunes and iPhoto. The opportunities with version 5.0 are great.

Philip Roy gave positive reviews about HS5 in his NZMac blog.

I look forward to working with HyperStudio 5.0 in the future.
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Thursday, June 28, 2007

So What's with HyperStudio 5.0?


So what's in HyperStudio 5.0?

It LOOKS GOOD!!!!

Roger took us on an extensive, albeit sometimes jumbled, tour of his new
release on Tuesday Morning. I had seen a demo of it at the MacKiev booth a NECC the day before and it was wonderful.

For those of you who remember HyperStudio, you will be reacquainted with a long lost friend. HS is designed using the screen-by-screen format (didn't catch if they are still using the Card/Stack metaphor in 5.0.) Anyway, thumbnails of sequential cards can be streamed down the left side of the screen. Floating toolbars are more sophisticated because of the extensive palettes that appear instead of dropdown menus.

A wonderful addition that I saw involved editing drawing and painting efforts. You might remember in the earlier versions of HS, If you wanted to move something that you painted on a background, you had to marquee the object and then you moved the object AND any included background. What a
mess!!!!

HS 5 considers ANY creation as an individual object. This means that you can grab it, move it, rotate it, expand or contract it. It's a whole new world for editing.

The new HyperStudio is strong when considering the video and Web 2.0
opportunities. You can import videos into your project with relative ease.
Your video can include movie files as well as live feeds where you program
is encompassing direct, live video feeds from cameras connected directly to
the computer. This is just like HS 3.0 The NEW addition allows you to link
live webcams into the program. This wasn't completed when I saw it, but
they said that there would be a set of "approved" webcams that would be
allowed to link. Interesting.

On the output side, Roger was amazing us with the Podcasting capability.
This option wasn't ready for demonstration, but it appeared that you could
export your project to a video that could be podcasted. It would include
the RSS code but you would have to find a site where you would post it. I
don't think that this is officially a podcast because those are usually
limited to an audio file, it's more like a vodcast.

Overall, all that I can say is "ROGER'S BACK and I AM excited!!!!"

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

HyperStudio is Announced!

Why was I getting up at 5:45 AM for 7:00 breakfast at the Omni Hotel sponsored by the KievMac software company? It was because Roger Wagner would be there to unveil HyperStudio 5.0.

You might remember HyperStudio. It was a multimedia authoring tool that Roger Wagner (then a 4th grade teacher in San Diego) developed back in 1986. He wanted a user-friendly system that 9-year-olds could use to create programs that were filled with images, text, sounds and animation.

Roger began the HyperStudio company and matured HyperStudio on the Apple IIgs and then onto the Macintosh and Windows platforms. It was a wonderful programming language that was used in k-12 schools throughout the world. We used it for our Educational Media classes to provide a relatively easy way for students to create multimedia programs.

In 1999, Roger had the good fortune of selling his HyperStudio company to The Learning Company for millions of dollars. This was fortunate for Roger but highly unfortunate for the rest of the world. The Learning Company tried to update HyperStudio to version 4.0 and the program imploded around its faulty code. This was so disastrous that schools, teachers and kids dropped this fallen albatross for the likes of mPOWER and PowerPoint.

Even amidst the shards of HyperStudio, Sunburst Software purchased HyperStudio from The Learning Company - Talk about a Fire Sale . . . They decided to rewrite the program from the ground up. Apparently, they enlisted the services of MacKiev. This is a software programming company in
. . . Russia of course.

Last November, Sunburst flew me over to Chicago for a day to consult on some upgrades that they were considering for their keyboarding software. I found myself in the car with a man who informed me that they were working on HyperStudio but they are just trying to settle some ownership rights issues.

Well, apparently, rights were settled last Friday when Roger Wagner signed on the dotted line to purchase the program and then market it through MacKiev. I don't know what the agreement is, but I DO know that they are promising to release HyperStudio 5.0 by September.

I have spent this entry explaining the background of HyperStudio but didn't say much about the program. Don't want to make this posting too long, so I will continue with this next time.

Z