Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Hyperstudio just keeps getting better

One of highlights of ISTE always is getting a chance to catch up with Roger Wagner and the team around Hyperstudio. In the enormous trade hall at this conference it is very rare to find the actual developers of products sitting at a booth talking to people and gathering feedback, so Hyperstudio is the exception.

The standout developments I saw demonstrated at the Hyperstudio Booth this year were:

Green screen improvements - you have always been able to do green screen from years back, but the ability to use built in cameras and create green screen movies directly onto the card you are working on is great.

HTML5 - No plug ins necessary for online browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE, IOS) means that finally it will be worth publishing stacks online.  Until now there has been a plugin for Safari, but we have found it a barrier for sharing stacks with non-techie people who are not confident about installing plugins.

Realtime Information and collaboration with Google Docs - this means that a Google Doc can be embedded inside a Card on Hyperstudio.  People are going to love the ability to finally have images, movies etc attached to Google Forms (currently you can't do this in Google Forms) to create more meaningful tests and quizzes.

Embedding any HTML code in a card - this means your voicethreads, animates, vimeos etc can be embedded in Hyperstudio.

The last three developments are still in Beta, but they will be a free upgrade for anyone who has a current license.

I just wish there was a Linux version so our Manaiakalani kids could use it on their netbooks!

No comments:

Post a Comment