Quizer 2.3 review
DownloadQuizer is a computer tool for authoring and administering multi-media quizzes or content fit for interactive instruction and learning.
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Quizer is a computer tool for authoring and administering multi-media quizzes or content fit for interactive instruction and learning. Target users include teachers, students and general Mac users. Main features include (ordered alphabetically): accurate timing, audible & visual feedback, automatic scoring, built-in catalog service, support for zero configuration networking (Bonjour technology), extensive support of drag & drop for editing as well as viewing tasks, error checking, hirarchical content organization, html support, integration with .Mac, kiosk mode, multimedia support (sound, images, movies, html), templates for reuse, test as you build, undo & redo, unlimited layout freedom.
What's New:
Streamlined the user interface for checking available publications. A user can now specify via Preferences whether he wants Quizer to automatically scan for available publications in the background when Quizer starts. If any publication is detected, a panel pops up automatically allowing the user to open a publication by double clicking. The user can always bring up the same panel manually as before.
Made many of the controls appearing on the document viewer configurable by content authors. Most controls (such as the timer access button, the layout toggle button, the scoreboard, the slide show controller, the help button, the submit button, the viewer resize button, the default layout) can be specified by the content author.
Changed the design of Document Viewer by abolishing the toolbar in favor of the ability to control the viewer's look and feel on a per document basis. For those who care, toolbar is a application wide feature that all similar documents must share. For our needs, toolbar is not flexible enough. Polished the user interface of the document viewer with a different design and nicer icons.
Refined the Publisher Panel by introducing a new activity indicator and helpful tool tips. When documents are published via Bonjour, a flashing beacon informs a user of the event.
Quizer now supports the concept of student mode. Prior to this release, Quizer allowed any user to be both the content author and content consumer. While this arrangement gave users a lot of power, it can be confusing or overwhelming to pure content consumers (i.e. students, trainees). The enhancement recognizes the fact that a typical user tends to use Quizer in a dominant role either as content auther or consumer. Via the Preferences Panel, a user can declare his dominant role as either 'student' or 'author'. In student mode, the Quizer menu is greatly simplified and highly relevant. This enhancement is movivated to make the life of content consumers a lot easier without taking away any functionality.
Streamlined the File menu. Eliminated the entire View Document submenu as the functionality is accessible (more appropriately) from the Document Viewer user interface. Doing so reduces the clutter of the File menu. Added 'Open Existing Document', 'Open New Answer...', 'Open Existing Answer...' to give users finer control over these tasks without having to go through the Document Browser. Renamed 'Open...' as 'Open Browser...'. Grouped all the items related to exchanging documents under the heading of 'Exchange via Bonjour'. Renamed 'Subscribe Document...' as 'Check For Publications...'.
Streamlined the way answers are submitted via Bonjour. When an answer file is submitted, the submitter will receive a popup warning about the fact that once submitted, answsers can not be changed. When a submission is successful, the submitter receives a pop up notification.
Document Browser has been improved to automatically update itself of new documents and answer files as they are created. Previously a user needed to manually refresh the browser to pick up additions.
Enhanced the way shapes (circle and rectangle) are manipulated in edit mode. It is now much easier to size shapes to very small dimensions. The object handles become smaller and fewer automatically as the shapes are sized down. Previously, the object handles could get in the way when shapes were sized down. The Object Inspectors for the shapes are hanced to facilitate precise specification of small dimensions.
Improved drag and drop support in edit mode. Images, URL (from the URL input field only) and selected text can be dragged directly from Safari onto a receiving slide. When a URL is dropped on Quizer, a graphical hyperlink is created for the underlying URL by default. When an individual html, or a folder of html files are dropped onto slide, a web view object is created in stead of a hyperlink. A web view is much like an embedded browser and allows for much more powerful and yet simple user interface. Text can be dragged from other applications onto a receiving slide. Tested applications include TextEdit, Mail, Word, Safari, FireFox and KeyNote. Chances are that any Mac applications, so long as it supports draggable text, can be a likely draggable supplier of raw text for Quizer. This should be good news for user productivity.
Flash content is now well supported. The enhancement made it easy to incorporate flash content. The easiest way to get flash content into a Quizer document is to drag a desired flash file from the Finder onto a receiving slide and it can then be resized, repositioned on the resulting web view as needed. Another way to add flash content is via the Object Inspector associated with a web view.
Enhanced web view with two additional functions: speak highlighted text and lookup selected word in the built-in English dictionary (this is a Tiger only feature). This enhancement makes web view objects more useful and user friendly. One possible use of these options is to use them as a self study tool with which one can learn English since a dictionary and synthethised speech of any selected English text are right at the reader's finger tips.
A pdf file when dropped on a slide is now presented in a web view. Previously, it was treated like an image, which may not always be appropriate. A web view can comfortably handle an arbitrary size pdf file.
Improved the recording playback user interface. Prior to this release, when a recording already exists, a subtle play button was displayed in the middle of recording icon. This design turned out to be not as user friendly for all users. The improvement resulted in relocating the play button to the lower right corner of the recording button. A more conspicuous icon is used instead. This made the purpose of the play button much more obvious in the context while still maintain a compact design.
Fixed a bug that caused Quizer to crash when entering Kiosk mode for the second time.
Issues: a few enhancements only works for MacOSX 10.4 (Tiger). In the context of WebView, the dictionarty lookup feature does not work on MacOSX 10.3 (Panther) as system support of an English dictionary is available in Tiger only. Another example is the animated images that appears on the document publisher and acquirer panels. They don't animiate as expected on Panther.
Quizer 2.3 keywords