Day: July 9, 2006

One of my favorite software discoveries from NECC was MacKiev’s KidPix 3.x.

We go way back with KidPix. KidPix helped Cindy convince the school board that Macs (the LC) were the way to go when computers were first purchased for Grand Forks elementary classrooms. Our second grade daughter created a Kid Pix project (she colored a line art drawing of a dinosaur, recorded a song about dinosaurs, and typed in the lyrics of the song) as a demonstration. She entered the text as a something to do as the meeting progressed without our suggestion. At the time, it was a very impressive demonstration of multimedia authoring (we still include her “dinosaur project” image in the forward to our book).

We created a slide show before we knew what such things were called and before the feature was added to KidPix. The procedure was a little complicated – it required that KidPix pict files be attached to individual cards of a HyperCard stack, audio had to be extracted from the KidPix files (using Resedit) and added to the HyperCard stack, and the stack had to be activated by a script we hacked together and attached to each card so that stack the entire collection would automatically play. (I still miss HyperCard.)

I think KidPix got kind of buggy and there were some strange things going on with which company was actually upgrading and selling the product (I am still confused because you can purchase two versions).

I am an advocate again. We ran across a new KidPix feature at NECC (the MacKiev update to version 3) that we like. You can now export a KidPix slideshow as a podcast. I find the idea of second graders creating podcasts a little freaky, but why not.

A simple example (turn up the volume). This is playing as a Quicktime file (podcast size) within a web page – I thought this would be easier than sending as a podcast.