Nat Torkington, writing for the O'Reilly Radar, thinks that using iStopMotion builds essential skills for programmers and used it in a three week computer class for 7 to 10 year old students from his kid's primary school who aspired to learn programming:

Programming is all about reducing big problems to small and easy tasks. So I paired up kids on two Macs I brought from home, and we used iStopMotion to build stop-motion animations. This teaches them to think in terms of small steps, while at the same time they become familiar with the computers. And, best of all, it's enormous fun.

2006 ends as a very successful year for Boinx Software. We finally got iStopMotion into the Apple Retail stores and managed to grow our US business by almost 60% compared to 2005. Worldwide the growth was almost 50%. For 2007 we have great ambitions. Starting at Macworld in January where Oliver will be giving a 45 minute seminar on how to make great slide shows each day at The Digital Photography Experience. At the same time, at BETT in London, iStopMotion will be featured prominently at the Create at BETT booth. In March, we will exhibit with a small booth at PMA 07 in Las Vegas. We could almost stay there because just four weeks later, at NAB, we will have the biggest booth in company history and hope to make a big impression on the pros. Plans for 2007 also include major new versions for our apps, a pro HD setup for iStopMotion, great new stuff with Quartz Composer and more. Of course we will keep you updated through Boinx Chronicles and the Newsletter we send out roughly monthly. We hope 2006 was as good to you as it was to us and wish you all the best for 2007. Oliver Breidenbach for the Boinx Software Team.

Just a short note, especially interesting if your Mac OS version number starts with 10.3: We just released a small maintenance update to iStopMotion carrying the most absurd version number 1.10.2. Yeah, it is 1.10.2, not 1.1.2, unfortunately we ran out of single digit decimal numbers a while ago...
Head over to the iStopMotion site for details and the download.

Today, we are coming out of the closet with something which we have been working on for a couple of months: Quartz Compositions. Quartz Composer is a great tool by Apple with which you can create nice animations, for example for iTunes visualizers, templates for use with a number of applications, for example ChatFX which is a plug in for iChat, iMovie HD and others. Examples of professional tool are "Quartz Stacker" by bug.tv and Final Cut Pro. Many people create great screensavers, desktop backgrounds and even games (co-authored by Dominik Wagner of the CodingMonkeys and Achim Breidenbach of Boinx) with Quartz Composer. But we took it a step further and developed templates that can be filled with dynamic data. You can see the work we did in the TV shows of DAF (Deutsches Anleger Fernsehen). (Unfortunately, they stream in Windows Media format so you'll need Flip4Mac installed on your Mac.) Let's look at some examples: This is one of the less complicated examples. The data for the ticker at the bottom is provided by an RSS feed which is created by the content management system NCPower by NorCom which drives the whole solution. The editors at DAF can provide the text for the text box on demand. The most challenging part is to get the text to flow into the blue box since Quartz Composer has no flowing text tool. This chart is the most complicated thing we did, since you can't draw in Quartz Composer nor has it much to offer for reading in data. But the data had to come from a SQL database and be rendered into a chart in real time. If you want to know how we did it, contact us by email. In the future, we plan to work more with Quartz Composer, publishing a number of Quartz Compositions and Quartz Composer plug-ins. In order to stay tuned, you can subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog, to our newsletter or to the RSS feed of the Quartz Compositions category.

This week I get to be guest judge on the MyDreamApp contest. My post on the O'Reilly Mac DevCenter Blog brought in the most traffic so I won a spot.

Presenting: The new Boinx Chronicles. We are using an interim design because we do not want to spoil the surprise of the new boinx.com ...ups. Well. A couple of housekeeping things to do before we can resume the regular programming: - Find out about RSS feeds for categories - Learn how to redirect the old RSS feeds Onward!

I am currently in the process of switching Weblog software to Wordpress. This means for you that we will have much more content because finally everybody will be able to blog. We can bring back Comments and I might finally be able to figure out the Pingback thingy.

So, what is wrong with what we've got? (Which is the most excellent Blojsom.)

We switch to Wordpress because we are switching all of our tools to AMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP). I do not have the time any more to keep track of all the other technologies. This move also means we can host the site on our hosted server which means it is going to be much faster and can handle more traffic.

So, farewell, Blojsom, you have been a friendly, reliable and exciting companion over the last two years.

Posting may be very slow while we do this transition.

While at WWDC in San Francisco, I joined Scott Sheppard, Sam Levin and Brad Wright at the Inside Mac Radio studio to record the August 12th episode. It was great fun. I thought it was a very professional setup. Click here to listen to the episode.

I was talking about FotoMagico 1.7 and the Apple Design Award.