The Visual Almanac consisted of videosdisc and HyperCard software which offered teachers and children a way to author multimedia presentations. While most authoring tools today emphasize the glue they give to combine different forms of media, the Visual Almanac emphasized the types of media that can be glued together. Back in 1987, there weren't the dozens of CD-ROMs that we see today full of clip art, audio, animation, and video.

 

 

Collections

Collection of 7,000 images and sounds are stored as multimedia objects. User can browse the collection and save images and sounds of interest. Once saved, the clips move to the Composition Workspace.

 

 

	A Collection would describe only the material on the videodisc; every item would have a unique title, descripton, set of keywords, videodisc address, and source and credit information. There are fileds for date, location and "other data," to hold information to be used with the graphers, mappers and other analytical tools. Once a collection stack is created, the composition tools can then be used to create multimedia object buttons for that videodisc.
The images in the collection can be saved to individualized HyperCard stacks. <top>

Composition Workspace

Multimedia objects--composed of descriptive text elements, keywords, image types--were the core of the Visual Almanac's system. These objects could be used in a variety of ways. They could be simply displayed in composition templates; they could be organized in selection lists; they could be edited and combined with other objects.

 

 

A sample workspace shows the tools available for production.

 

 

 

 

 

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Activities
	The activities section include professional explorations into the use of multimedia. In an effort to consider how people will interact with images and sounds, the product includes a variety of pre-structured exercises for the user. These range from the simple orchestra piece, where the user clicks on instrucments and hears their sound, to the Playground Physics activity where users explore the conservation of angular momentum in the context of a moving merry-go-round.
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