C.K Sample, III (what a cool name, or is it a nick?) writes at The Unofficial Apple Weblog: "If you too are an aspiring stop-motion animator, you might want to check out iStopMotion from Boinx. I've owned the DV copy of this program since it first came out and I love it."

This year, Apple brought the very successful Apple Teacher Institute seminar series from the UK to the rest of Europe. iStopMotion is featured in presentations or workshops in many of those events. Boinx will be present in Switzerland and Germany, in Belgium Apple Distinguished Educator Lucas Van de paer will be hosting the workshops and in the UK, there will be two seminars, a basic and an advanced.

Apple UK posts a mini-site on animation in the classroom: "Animation Inspirations - Bring fun and excitement to multimedia learning."

The site features many tips on getting started with animation, model making and music and sound and has lots of excellent animation examples. Of course, all done with iStopMotion. Thanks to Oscar and Stuart for doing this.

Finally, iStopMotion 1.8 is ready for prime time. Read all about the new features here. The highlight is of course the sound track which lets you do lip syncing or time your animation to music.

I got an EcoSphere last Christmas. It is a small aquarium like thing but completely sealed off. A complete ecosystem. Usually it hosted 3 to 4 small shrimps that you can see on the picture, if you are lucky. (The image updates every 5 minutes, we will be bringing it down to 1 min). Now there is only one shrimp left. The question is: Will the ecosystem collapse or recover? The green stuff are algae. If it is dark, it is night!