It really is. What makes Pixie 4 the best ever are all the little things we added that people have been asking for. It may look really similar, but there are a lot of reasons it is just plain better.
Let’s start with the export. I love ePub3. It has a lot of potential. Unfortunately right now, only iBooks really makes it shine. But hey, how many “not-an-iPad” are schools really buying right now?
Playing a student created eBook back in iBooks is the closest you can get to the same experience as watching it in Pixie. And when parents put it on their iPads, kids can show it to everyone they meet. Pass it around the table at Thanksgiving, the family will be amazed. I know mine is. My son Iain is 7 and the perfect age to be authoring his own illustrated iBooks in Pixie.
People wanted to be able to add hyperlinks to instructions so kids could be guided to appropriate research. It was our most popular request and now they can. The library search is smarter so kids can more easily find the things that they are looking for. Printing is greatly improved with new Avery print layouts, a multi-page preview, printing page numbers, and choosing specific pages to print.
And Pixie is easier to use and touch. A lot more things happen on a single click or tap to make it easier for younger students to navigate. It is easier to add backgrounds to existing pages and import pages from Pics4learning or from activities.
We have spent the last two years bringing first Share and now Pixie up-to-date with the latest software sandbox and security standards. We isolated memory intensive tasks like video export so they are much less likely to crash Pixie. We identified the most commonly reported errors by our users in 2013 and have fixed them.Pixie opens bigger files. We are always amazed when people send us files saying “my computer runs out of memory before it can open this file.” Then we open the file and it is huge. It has way more pages and content than we ever expected. With Pixie 4 we have re-engineered how Pixie opens files so it can open and edit files much larger than were possible before.
Will there still be errors? Of course there will, there is no such things as software without errors. But there are a lot fewer, and let me tell you, what kids were doing to create these errors caught us by surprise. It is quite a learning experience. While you will never “see” most of this work, it is some of the most important aspects of the Pixie 4 upgrade. It will make sure Pixie works for you now, and well into the future.
This new Pixie really is the best one we have done. I have said that with every version, and probably will say it with the next. But, this version of Pixie is really special. I know you will like it.
David Wagner, CEO
