Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Robot Media storybuilder


I have been trying out the truly lovely storybook app builder by Robot Media for the past few weeks. This team is out of Barcelona and have produced a clean, pleasing, relatively easy piece of software. No strings and publishable to various platforms. I'm besotted. 


The interface is lovely, beautifully organized, and easy on the eyes.  To use it you need to have all your images in png or jpg format. Storybuilder will tween your stack of pngs for animations. The previewer is instant and really lovely.

Cons so far are:
Nonexistent instructions. There are seven videos on their youtube channel which are not particularly high resolution,  have no narration and the same annoying theme music. They load slowly which makes it hard to scrub back and forth looking for the bit you want. So a tip is to copy the url of the video and paste it into keepvid.com so you can have the 7 video tutorials on your desktop. Studying these videos to learn how to use Storybuilder requires concentrated scrutiny, but I got there.

Functions I'm hoping they'll add:
1. animations can scale up
2. drag and drop into a container, e.g. flowers into a basket
3. being able to choose x,y coordinates of draggable objects.
4. draggable characters can flip horizontally if you drag them in the opposite direction like Nosy Crow's Cinderella.
5. addition of path animation
6. being able to add code for your own special interaction


Here's a little video demo of what I've done so far with my design of The King Has Goat Ears by Katarina Jovanovic and Philipe Beha, published by Tradewind books.

1 comment:

  1. What an interesting post Cynthia. You will soon be flying with APP creating many wonderful new BOOK APPS. Thanks so much for sharing your adventures in APPS creation.

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