Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Revolution Media US$39!!

Revolution Media is being offered for a limited time for the fantastic price of $39!

Until November 30, you can save $10 off the normal download price of $49.

What is Rev Media? Rev Media has nearly all of the most important features of the full-blown Revolution product lines with the exception of being able to compile a standalone executable file. However, anything created with Media will run on all supported platforms (meaning, most importantly, Mac and Windows) via the freely-downloadable Media stack player (which is similar to the functionality provided by Hyperstudio).

From the company's website:

Revolution Media is the fun and creative, do-anything software construction kit everyone can afford. Learn programming logic, build exciting games, make quick work of projects large and small, and construct compelling multimedia experiences using drag-and-drop interface elements and the world's easiest language.

The company touts as advantage #1 that you can "learn programming" using Media. But, inasmuch as the "P" word tends to scare off alot of people who envision learning some nasty systems programming language featuring lots of ugly dot.syntax.unreadable.incomprehensible.crap, it should be noted that Media comes with the following out of the box:

* Templates to help automate the production of games, kiosks, portfolios and slide-shows
* 27 Quick-start tutorials and videos on how to use Media
* 78 Pre-built sample scripts to copy-paste into your own projects
* 13 Example stacks for you to use, modify, and take apart
* 377 page PDF User's Guide
* Full-featured, easy to learn English-like scripting language


Rev Media imports a broad spectrum of media formats -- GIF, JPG, PNG (for images), WAV, AIF (etc. for audio, although weird sampling rates on WAV don't work well), and QuickTime -- and thus make the product ideal for rich media presentations.

If I didn't already own an Enterprise license, I'd take advantage of this offer pronto! This product offers so many more advantages (short of the included stock media) than Hyperstudio that I still fail to understand the death-grip the latter has on the education market (probably it's that the older people with Ph.D.'s in education remember how horrific learning to program used to be back in the medieval period that they simply shy away from anything that promotes the "P" word... but that doesn't mean that the rest of us need to be dinosaurs, right?!).

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