![]() There is, however, a program called "Stykz" which is like a pared-down Pivot, and has a Mac version. ![]() They have used it before so they were familiar with the workings, but I was enthralled so I went home to download it - only to find that there's no Mac version. The girls are only in grade 6 but they managed to create some pretty amazing scenes in 45 minutes. Most of them chose to do refugee scenes as this was fresh in their mind, even though the teacher reminded them that the percentage of migrants to Australia who come as refugees is less than 7%. I first saw Pivot last week at school where the kids were using it to create scenes about Migration. Google's announcement to discontinue Wave I will definitely be holding this up in the classroom. Therefore, they took a risk and it didn't work, but they learned and grew from the experience. They have decided not to keep pouring money into something that isn't working and most importantly, they have recognised that much of the technology that went into creating the product has been and will be useful elsewhere. They have acknowledged that it didn't do what they expected. Unfortunately the take-up of this product was far from Google's expectations, and they have had the courage to do what many others won't - gracefully move on. You could type, or draw, and you don't have to press enter every time - it just comes up automatically. The functionality was brilliant and allowed a lot of collaboration, for example the 'brainstorming' tool (right). To be honest I really wasn't sure whether it even had been released publicly, although I vaguely remember playing with it once. All over discussion boards worldwide, people begged and pleaded for access to something they couldn't have. When it did get released to the public it really wasn't a big deal, at least not in any of the places I was looking. This technology was soft-launched with much fanfare in the geek community, as you could only join in the beta testing if you knew someone and got an invitation. It takes at lot of effort to create a simple animation.Google today announced that they are discontinuing their social networking software, "Google Wave".Although the release year is 2010, the program was stable and worked smoothly.The help is concise and easy to understand.I suppose the best results can be expected if you add a lot of artistic creativity to the work and do not attempt to create anything realistic. I you search on the web for animation created with Stykz, you do no find a lot of impressive animations. The segment manipulation and frame set help a bit and reduces the required effort, in comparison to a plain old vector drawing program, but not a lot. So, basically, you draw frame after frame, manually bringing in all of the details. If you have ever watched a documentary on how virtual reality is added to movies, you might hope that you can dress up your stick figures with textures or whatever, but such features do not exist. Also, you create stick animations, and do not get any more than that. The program has options to stretch, rotate, distort, add and remove segments, so that helps a bit to get the work done, but do not expect any 'magic', like automatic transformations in multiple steps from one frame to another. You will have to bend arms and legs to the right positions for every frame. Of course, rigid objects are copied from frame to frame and you can simply drag them to a new position, but a walking person is another matter. Basically, your figures are made out of segments and you will have to pay attention to each and every segment in each and every frame to create smooth, natural looking motion. However, it will take a lot of effort to even create a simple animation. So, my general conclusion is that Stykz does what it promises: creating stick animations. With or without the help topic, Getting Started - Creating Your First Animation, you will probably find it easy to make a first animation of a stick person walking over the canvas, or stage, as it is called. It is written by someone who made an effort to explain how it works and how to use it and mentioning the limitations, so you do keep searching for features you are missing. The help is extensive and concise and is really clarifying operation of the program. I had no crashed, nor did I discover any bugs. However, the program installed just fine on Windows 10 and ran smoothly. The 1.0.2 version was released in 2010, according to Help - About. Just for fun, I have installed Stykz 1.0.2 (223) on Windows 10 and played around with it.
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