Real World Computing

Batch processing is integrated directly into the main Squeeze screen, but this complicates what should be an entirely separate process. There doesn't seem to be any way to add a playback bar and, overall, Squeeze feels lightweight compared to Flix Pro and offers little over and above SWiSH Video2 or Flix Standard considering its price. For professional purposes, Flix Pro wins hands-down for the level of control it makes possible and its batch processing, while SWiSH Video2 offers enough power for personal use with the cleanest interface and low cost.

Question Writer

Many readers contacted me following my coverage of Question Tools (www.questiontools.com) in my last column. It's no great surprise that the issue of online assessment is one that generates a range of solutions and, while the end results may be similar whichever product you choose, the process of getting there can be widely different.

Alex McCabe of Central Question (www.centralquestion.com) told me about the company's Question Writer product (www.questionwriter.com), which takes a different approach to Question Tools. Question Writer uses Flash as its underlying delivery mechanism, as we do with our in-house authoring system Jigsaw. This has the advantage of giving the developer access to Flash's huge range of features while also being widely available as a technology. However, Flash isn't suitable for creating a sophisticated IDE for putting together the assessments: quite simply, Flash wasn't intended for developing desktop applications and so this job needs to be done in a fully fledged programming system such as, in Question Writer's case, J# .NET or, in our case, REALbasic 2005. The advantage of choosing a .NET development language is that you can access all the latest interface features such as menus with icons and coloured toolbars. The downside is that the end user may need to install the latest version of the .NET Framework before installing and using the application.

My personal view is that, despite the fact that it lacks some of the coolest interface features, a non-.NET application development tool such as REALbasic is on balance the better choice for most purposes. You certainly end up with more compact code, with fewer dependencies, and the bonus with REALbasic is that you can develop under Windows, Mac OS X or Linux and deploy on all three, as long as you don't use any platform-dependent code.

Having said that, Question Writer certainly looks the business. It uses an icon-based approach that's reminiscent of the ancient IconAuthor and DazzlerMax. The advantage of this is that it makes the hierarchy of assessments>pages>question types>evaluation clear and easy to collapse back down so that you can concentrate on a single task at a time. An 'assessment' is a container for any number of pages. Within each page, you can place text, graphics, animations, video or audio alongside interactive question types such as Multiple Choice, Free Text and self-contained Flash objects.

Add a Multiple Choice question, for example, and you can then add further nodes that describe how it looks, including a text description and a series of options. Having done that, you can then add a Scoring node that contains any number of Evaluate nodes, each of which contains Condition and Check Answer nodes. If that all sounds complicated, it really isn't: the process is logical and, once you get your head around the way the structure and evaluation process works, it's simple to put together moderately sophisticated assessments without any technical knowledge. These assessments can then be exported as QTI (Question & Test Interoperability) XML files so they can inter-relate with QTI-compliant delivery systems. SCORM 1.2 is also supported, as is a straightforward publishing to HTML/Flash option and reasonable support for Questionmark Perception.

Continued....