New Features in MaxAuthor 2.5

12/12/01

 

Here are the new features added to MaxAuthor since V2.0 (12/13/00).  Please see our updated MaxAuthor manual (pdf), and tutorials for more information about these new features.

 

MaxAuthor Online Lesson Generation Improvements

  1. Your lessons can now have Java based Flashcards which are very similar to the Windows version of our Flashcards, see http://cali.arizona.edu/maxnet/flash.htm for examples.  To use this feature, check the flashcard option when in the MaxAuthor File…Export…Html dialog.
  2. Also new for web delivery: a listening dictation exercise where the student can listen to sentences and type in what they heard and have their responses graded.
  3. When exporting a lesson for any language except Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, the fill-in-the-blank (Cloze) exercise now contains a pool of the non-US keyboard characters for the student to copy and paste into the blanks.
  4. We've added new style sheets to make the online lessons look more like the Windows versions, and you can customize them any way you choose for your own lessons:
    stylword.css - word audio; links are underlined in red by default
    stylsent.css - sentence audio, links underlined in black by default
    stylfoot.css - footnotes, links underlined in green by default
  5. We've simplified the File…Export…Html dialog by compartmentalizing the process.

Other MaxAuthor Improvements

  1. Support for 25 new languages (for a total of 47 languages):

 

Albanian

Catalan

Croatian

Czech

Danish

Finnish

Gaelic (romanized)

Hungarian

Hupa

Indonesian

Kongo

Kurripako

Latin

Luiseno

Nahuatl

Norwegian

Ojibwe (Chippewa)

Polish

Romanian

Siswati

Slovak

Slovenian

Swahili

Tagalog

Xhosa

 

 

2.    New audio dictionary feature: you can now more easily 'borrow' word and sentence audio recordings between lessons.  The first time you click on Record All, MaxAuthor checks to see if you have chosen a Dictionary Max file for the written language of the lesson.  If so, it will prompt:  "open up the audio dictionary?"  If you respond YES, it recursively reads every lesson linked to by the Dictionary Max file (this may take a while if there are many lessons).  Then, when you are recording words, MaxAuthor will check to see if a recording already exists for that word in any of the lessons linked to by the Dictionary Max File and gives you the opportunity to borrow the existing recording.

  1. When recording audio, the recording dialog remembers where you dragged it last time and goes back to the same place whenever it needs to re-appear.  The recording dialog also now displays in the title bar which language is being recorded.
  2. When creating a new MAX file, the Import dialog will now always make "All Files (*.*)" a choice.  The Spanish, French, German, and Italian text importation has been upgraded.  For any language MaxAuthor supports, to import text into a new lesson, select Edit…Copy from your favorite application, Paste into Notepad, and Save it with any filename you choose.  Then in MaxAuthor, in the Create New File dialog, click the Import button and select the file you just saved.
  3. Ctrl-A is now a Keyboard shortcut for Edit…Select All.
  4. You can now Import Audio in the Word Properties or Sentence Properties Dialog.  The imported audio file is copied to the lesson directory and renamed according to the MAX convention.  This is very handy when working from pre-recorded DAT or cassette source materials.
  5. Automatic word segmentation problem fixed for Kazakh and other languages.