Hi Chris,
I sat all my engineers in a room put your video up on a whiteboard and made them sit through it.
It was very revealing and the guy who did the video hid under a chair!!
There where a few laughs as we willed you to try and drag the tooltip label so you could position it!!
We also recognised that it was hard to unlock the object. Again we willed you to use the property browser or to to go into design mode.
But saying that you are spot on and we appreciate your excellent review.
We have fixed the dragging on a video issue (Actually you can insert media from the menu and it does this by default)
And we also hope we have fixed the aspect ratio.
Cheers.
Regards
Andrew Edwardson
Head of Software Development
Promethean

I don’t like to play favourites with IWB software, but I do actually quite like the new Inspire edition more than I expected. I’ve been pretty critical of ActivStudio in the past, despite the fact that I work with it regularly… in fact I had a really big whinge to the Promethean people at the last IWB conference in Melbourne. I think as end-users, teachers need to be far more critical of crappy software design, and speak up when software gets foisted upon them that is less than it ought to be. Software is the most malleable material in the world, so having a software app that is less than it could be is just unacceptable in my book.

I find that the deeper I delve into AS3, the worse the design flaws become. It can be counterintuitive and hard to use. In particular, I’m most disappointed in AS3’s ability to handle media, specifically video. It is finicky and fussy about file types, and looks like a software app that is much older than it really is. AS3 certainly does not look like a modern, post-Web2.0 application.

As for Smart Notebook, I really like the intuitiveness of Notebook, and it was the IWB software that I learned to use first. I think it’s much easier to learn and far easier to discover the features. However, I must say that after having worked with Promethean’s ActivStudio3 for a year, despite the fact that it’s clunky and dated, I found Smart Notebook 10 much more limited as to what I could do with it. I kept trying to do things in Notebook that were possible in AS3 and realising that some features I have taken for granted were just was not built into Notebook.

Having said that, I still prefer the better usability of Notebook, even though AS3 is probably more functional. The new Inspire edition will, hopefully, add the much-needed usability to the Promethean product. BTW, I realised after I made the videos, that Inspire can in fact be tweaked and modded to look more like Notebook… toolbars across the top of the screen, etc.

But the video handling really is in need of a fix. Notebook is FAR better at handling video. Fix that in Inspire, and things could get really interesting.