Last Friday I watched a webinar that gave an overview of the features in Storyline 2. Don’t worry. You didn’t miss out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity or anything — they have them every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Anyway, I’ve always wanted to try this software. People make cool looking projects with it, but it sounded really intimidating and time consuming. Eek! Scary! However, after I sat through the tour I really wanted to give the program a test drive. I figured that the best way to do this would be to work backwards (in a sense) by using a template that someone else had already created. I found a cute quiz with a dinging bell and an attractive “pathway to victory” and proceeded to make a test about my cat. Yup. I’m that person. So I made it extremely purple, added a silly blonde cartoon character (me, obviously haha), and many, many images of my cat.

This experiment isn’t perfect. Usually I would obsess over font style, size, positioning, getting zooming and times exactly right etc… but I really wanted to show this as a true “work in progress.” This means that if you’re like me then you’re going to definitely notice things like:

  • The images aren’t always meticulously aligned
  • At the end of the game it doesn’t focus correctly on the word “purr…”
  • The borders on Watson’s images are a little off
  • Sometimes all of the “cans” you’ve collected don’t appear at the right time

But perhaps in version 2 I’ll have that all figured out? Thankfully, Storyline has a similar interface to Camtasia. The most obvious being that you can quickly manipulate, edit, drag, and drop each of a slide’s individual items (text, pictures, actions, sounds etc…) on a timeline. I think I’ll be able to get the hang of it. That chiming bell should probably be replaced with a meow too, right?

So, without further adieu, would you like to prove whether or not you know the ins and outs of Watson?