Studio ‘09 released…

Last Tuesday we released Articulate Studio ‘09 to the world after about 2 years of development, and I am certain once you try it you will find that it was well worth the wait.

It has taken me over a week to blog about this because honestly it takes you, as a QA person, about a week to get your stress level back down from a 10 to a 3 following a release.  We started the beta of Studio ‘09 back in May, and you won’t believe how many hours the entire Articulate team has worked in the last year to get these products out there.

We added some really cool new features to the product that were some of the more popular feature requests over the past several years.  Here are some of those features:

Articulate Presenter ‘09

• Direct FLV support on a slide (no more using my complicated workaround)
• Notes formatting
• A project file for easy project sharing
• A usable Audio Editor
• Improved image conversion
• Improved support for native PowerPoint shapes (basically everything should look better)
• Branching support

Articulate Quizmaker ‘09

• Slide view authoring environment modeled like PowerPoint so that you can make your quiz slides look exactly as you want them to
• A visual timeline to arrange objects and have them appear at certain times
• A free form drawing tool for hotspot questions
• Question grouping and locking (lock questions in place)
• Branching support

Articulate Engage ‘09

• Branching support to link from one step to another
• A color scheme editor to easily edit your color schemes
• Ability to create a summary slide

So those are some of the highlights of the more commonly requested features in the new studio, but that is not all.  We have also released the Articulate Video Encoder as part of Articulate Studio ‘09.  The video encoder allows anyone to easily convert almost any video format to FLV for use in any of their eLearning content.  It also allows you to easily record from your webcam and automatically convert it to FLV format.

I think the thing that shocks people the most when they try out the new Studio ‘09 is what Articulate Quizmaker has become.  Quizmaker was rebuilt from the ground up, and is truely now the easiest to use and most powerful quiz creation tool on the market.  We still offer you the ability to easily and rapidly create great looking quizzes as we have always done, but added the flexibility to customize your quizzes in almost anyway imagineable.  If you have not done so, check out some of the sample content created with the new Quizmaker ‘09:

http://www.articulate.com/products/quizmaker-demos.php

I am certain you will be blown away.

We have also made some big changes to our website (www.articulate.com), and we are still in the process of working on revamping our documentation.  So we still got many great things to come.

Well, I am very stoked that these products are now out there, and now that they are released I should have more time to devote to blogging, so hopefully you will start to see more of me.

Alright, have fun everyone!