This was the first product I worked on for Stephen Heppell at what was then called the Xploratorium, and later became ULTRALAB.
The Work Rooms was a Hypercard stack containing a suite of activities to support young learners develop skills with the computer. Stephen and Richard Millwood had designed them, and one summer, whilst I was on holiday from university, Richard asked me if I'd help them lick the coding into shape.
The Insights CD was developed as part of the Renaissance Initiative sponsored by Apple Computer (UK) and Apple Computer Europe. The initiative was a collaboration between higher education institutions in the United Kingdom to develop multimedia learning materials in a range of disciplines and to explore related issues.
This was also the first CD produced by ULTRALAB, and it included a number of Hypercard stacks which I created and/or worked on.
The best of these was probably Le Carnival Des Animaux, which Tom Smith and I created from an original idea by Stephen Heppell (and with help and advice from everyone else at the lab).
Here's some blurb from the ULTRALAB website:
Le Carnaval des Animaux is a program for interpreting the music by Saint-Saens of the same name. By controlling the CD-Audio on the Insights compact disc, the program permits you to try out different parts of the music (snippets), annotate your snippets with audio announcements and paint your interpretation to the music. Also in this folder is "Carnaval Music introduction" which explains how the music was recorded and placed on this compact disc. Carnaval has translations for English, Spanish, Catalan and Bulgarian. It is designed to support a hundred more languages and you could be the translator! "Notes for translators" has guidance if you decided to take up this challenge.
Coming soon: how did it get made, what else was on it, and why did it take us so long?
Did I port this project? No.
Did I do any of the coding? No.
Graphics? No.
What then?
Well. the earth shatteringly boring answer is that I had the joyous and wonderful job of putting together the final cds for all of the european versions that Feral published.
A word to the wise: if you are ever offered a job like this, refuse it! It's not worth it!
By this time, Bungie had been consumed by Microsoft, Oni had been taken on in a 'finished' state by another publisher (I think it was Take Two but I might be wrong), and Mac and PC versions had been released in the states.
Somehow Feral managed to get the deal to publish it on the Mac in Europe, but it transpired that nobody had ever actually build the European SKUs yet (see, you can tell I've worked on commercial software because I know about SKUs...).
So dopey old me gets about 12 CDs in the post one day with all the localised resources. This should be a cinch I say - presumably the software will just scan it's data, work out what languages it's got installed, and react accordingly.
If only...
It turned out that for each localised version the actual application needed recompiling with some code altered. Whoa! New ball game entirely. Now I have to compile the app, which means I need the source code. I also need someone to tell me how the hell to get it to compile. Time to call the developer... oh, hang on, the developer doesn't exist anymore.
You get the picture I'm sure. Eventually I tracked down someone who had worked on it, who was now working for Microsoft, and who was at pains to remind me every ten minutes that helping me wasn't his job! He did help though - at least enough for me to figure out how to fill in the blanks, make the correct code changes, and build installers which put the right bits of the jigsaw puzzle into the right places.
Ug! What a hellish job. Just what I didn't need whilst trying to track down the evil bug reports we were getting back from the newly release [Theme Park World] and the latest incarnation of the [Championship Manager] series.
