Saturday, June 16, 2018

iSpring 9! Lots of New Features

I always enjoy hearing from my friends at iSpring, who apart from being excellent humans with a great product are fun companions at minigolf. So I was delighted to get an email asking me to take a look at the newest release, iSpring9. 

Usually when a tool gets a refresh there are a few updates, but this new version of iSpring has advanced the product by leaps and bounds.  My three favorite changes:

1. New Video Editor

In this release iSpring greatly expanded the capability of the earlier, basic iSpring Cam. The newly-renamed iSpring Cam Pro includes a video editor that provides annotation/captioning as well as robust features such as adding in other video and audio elements, so you could have, say, timed text steps or a talking head video alongside an animation. 

2. LOTS more Interactions
This release offers a much-larger array of 12 interactions, including easy-to-animate charts. 
I was always a fan of iSpring's "timeline" interaction and am pleased to see the accordion available now as well.  


3. Drag and Drop! 
The iSpring quizzing tool goes to the next level with drag and drop capability. Honestly, I'm amazed whenever I play with these tools now: I remember 100 years ago (when we had to do web design by candlelight :-) )  when it took half a day and an instruction manual for me to code a drag and drop by hand in Dreamweaver. It feels almost magical to be able to do it now in a matter of minutes. 


Well, those are my favorite new features. Everything has more options that I haven't outlined here, from annotation and transparency setting on the videos to choices of how you work with the interactions and quiz types.

If you haven't yet checked out iSpring9 I encourage you to go download the trial and see what might let you check something off your own wishlist.