http://www.tellingstories.com
 

What’s it do?

Telling Stories allows the user to input personal events and accomplishments with the assistance of memory "joggers" such as time-line templates of historical events, questions about life events, lists of hit songs, etc. The user's biography as such is enhanced with pictures, music, and video and can be urned to a CD as a permanent record to be shared with family and friends.


Does It Do What It Promises?

Reviewer 1. Yes, it does, and it does it in an elegantly-design, simple but complete user interface that leads (and manages) one through the tasks involved.

Reviewer 2. Not exactly. If the program was renamed something like (Auto)Biography I would be more likely to say yes. But my first impression from the Website and the title, "Telling Stories", was of a program was more versatile than this program is. The main page of the program's Website lists many of life's events that the software is capable of capturing. While it can do this, it is done in the context of telling the life story of a single person moving along the timeline of their life. If you want to tell a story of an isolated event from the perspective of the event itself or of a group of people, this is not the software for you.

Reviewer 3. It does what it promises very easily by guiding the user with a series of Wizards. You start off the process by entering your name, your sex and your birthday. It then draws a horizontal sine wave line with extensions showing personal and major world events. From here you can add your personal accomplishments, such as when you graduated college, took that world cruise, got married, etc. On each of your events you can attach scanned or digital photographs, music, notes and recorded voice narrations. When you have completed the timeline, switch to the presentation mode, add various background images, different fonts to highlight aspects of the current slide and even change the transition between the slides.

Reviewer 4. Telling Stories is designed to allow any PC user to tell somebody's story his own, or someone else's. It can be a single event or a lifetime. In addition to the story itself, the author can integrate all other kinds of media: music, photos, certificates, videos or anything that he can bring into digital format. What the Telling Stories people have done so well is to simplify it all so that even novice users can succeed.


Was It Easy To Install?

Reviewer 1. Yes, straightforward and painless.

Reviewer 2. Yes.

Reviewer 3. By selecting the executable file, the application installed flawlessly within a couple of minutes.

Reviewer 4. Yes. Installation was straightforward and I was able to specify the location, shortcuts and other program parameters.


Good Points.

Reviewer 1. Spectacularly simple, straightforward, well thought out user interface -- one of the best that I ever recall seeing in a PC-application -- that lays out all of the required tasks and guides the user through them to the production of the final result, a computerized slide presentation assembling all the material input into a smooth production. One of the best programs I've ever seen at following the design wisdom of 'Keep it simple!' and yet include enough function, but not too much. Outstanding documentation, including an excellent online guided tour introduction, entirely sufficient for using the program productively. Whoever did it deserves a lot of credit if the program is a commercial success, as I expect it to be. With the exception of the Timeline View problems noted below, the presentation screens of the generated story are exceptionally well laid out and cleanly designed. It's easy to find whatever function you want to perform and get it done. Response time is excellent. Including the audio/song ripping function was a definite plus, and it was easy to use. However, ripping progress was VERY slow -- 3-5 minutes! for a 150-second song which resulted in 3.3Meg of HDD space. I cannot imagine anything other than CD or ZIP storage as transfer medium from one computer to another for any real Timeline.

Reviewer 2. If you want to tell the story of a single person in biographical format, this software will guide you through the process and the final result can be very nice. You can add photos, music, voice and text to develop the story fully.

Reviewer 3. Initially, there was a small issue with the software, but the company quickly identified it and sent out an update within a very short time. This, to me, shows a commitment to their customers. This program is a great way to save memories and important events in your personal and family life. Each biography is presented in a slide show that is played back on a Windows system. Many of us have a hard time remembering what happened at different parts of our lives, so instead of simply prompting you for information you are "interviewed" through a series of questions designed to trigger your memory. As a side note, it is amusing to see what was a major world event or what was the popular song when you graduated.

Reviewer 4. From the beginning, the Author is led through the story-building process. You give some basic facts about the person, pick the background themes, and the Quick-Start Wizard appears. You learn that there are two fundamental formats that you will work with - the Timeline (explained on the first page of the wizard), and the Presentation (the second page of the wizard,) short and simple. Close the Wizard and you are presented with the Timeline. It is an S-curve, with your subject's birth-date at one end and the present at the other. A few significant events appear on the line: some are personal (important birth dates) and others are historical (e.g., Berlin Wall falls). You can start with the events already there, or create new ones. Then you can begin to fill in the details. This is where I think that the program shines. At each event, you are given a number of tools to help you develop it. Each thing you click on pops up a window which gives you a space to work in (for example, type a story), with suggestions and hints on what you can do here. There are a number of predefined types of event (historical, birthday, graduation, job, etc.), and you can create your own. For each event, you have tabs to click on: Story, Images, Music, Video. With each type of event, you can use a set of questions and answers that will help you fill in details and personalize the story even more (for example: Was the Mother of the person who graduated present; did she cry?) Under Music, you have a Wizard to help you find and put in place any music you would like to have associated with that event. There is even a list of the top 100 music titles for that year (from 1950 - 2001) to help you in your search. This is not the actual music, but the titles, so you can add a reminder to yourself to get "Our Prom Song" from your collection of 45's, stored somewhere in the attic. And Talking Stories includes a CD "ripper"; this way, someone unfamiliar with all that kind of thing can copy the music from a CD onto the hard-drive, to be available when needed. Next is the Presentation area. This is where you do your editing, selecting backgrounds to the each event (here called a slide), choosing the font(s), checking out the music, and where it will fit in, adding voice-over, setting the timing of the slides. At each step in this process you have help surrounding you, so that you can see right on the screen what you need to do, and how to do it. As you come towards the end of your Presentation, you will decide whether you will show your story on this computer or whether you will have the program create a stand-alone executable file


Weak Points

Reviewer 1. Trying to fit everything onto and/or make visably attractive its Timeline View screen -- its main 'development' desktop view -- is simply impossible for anything more than trivial examples. There just isn't enough screen area for displaying the size icons used(and needed for visibility). My adding 18 items -a bare start of a project I actually had to do this past year of creating an autobiography covering 1936-2005 - to the working Timeline not only left many obscured icons, but from a higher-level perspective it left the overview of the screen a jumbled, unattractive mess. The program definitely needs to provide for stacked multiple-screen logically-connected Timeline Views to address the present screen space constraints; otherwise all you have is a toy -- albeit an interesting one. Telling Stories Responded: Did you find the zoom feature in the timeline view? If you click and drag the mouse over a portion of the timeline it will zoom in on that area. You can repeat to zoom in further. Technical Support, as far as I could find, is either missing-in-action or so well-hidden that I could never find it on the Website! The only token of support is a 12-item/3-screen Q&A section, all of which address How-To-Use or Functionality questions; NONE address Service/Support. Telling Stories Responded: If you scroll down to the end of the FAQ you will see a link to email for support. You can also get to the link to email us for support by clicking "contact" on the main navigation of our Web site. I would not purchase nor recommend Telling Stories without a definite support structure. Hopefully this is only a symptom of how early it is in its development cycle. Telling Stories Responded: We answer all support related questions within 24 hours and even phone back our customers where email support proves ineffective. We are evaluating putting telephone technical support in place as our user base grows. The trial use period limit of 15 days is underwhelming: this just isn't long enough to put a new unfamiliar program thru its paces. I seldom get a program installed, much less exercised, in its first 15 days in hand. I'd recommend 30 days minimum, which should be sufficient as easy and straightforward as this program is to use. The price of $49.50 I believe too high. I think $29-$39 more reasonable considering the special niche market it addresses. However, as I said above, to my knowledge it's the only game in town , and it does a great, if at present a flawed, job! Longer range, I believe a 2-tiered price structure would serve the product better : a "beginner" and '"advanced" version with incremental pricing. Limiting its use license to a single computer is neither practical nor saleable in today's marketplace, and I very seriously doubt enforceable, so why rub customers the wrong way right out of the box? Virtually all users have both a laptop and a deskside machine.

Reviewer 2. The Welcome Wizard is a series of screens you are obligated to click through and answer before starting to use the program. You are forced to make a series of choices about your story before you are able to start the program to find out what it is capable of doing. I personally found this to be obstructive and awkward. I started off with the idea of telling the story of my children's' adoption or of my grandparents' voyage from Europe and their early life in the U.S. Neither of these is suitable for telling with "Telling Stories" since this program is geared towards telling the life story of a single individual. However, there was really no way for me to know this without exploring the software and I couldn't explore the software without answering the Wizard's questions, which involved the name, gender, & birthday of the person as well as picking a background theme. Most of this was contradictory with the stories I wanted to tell, and the uncertainty was compounded by the format of the Wizard where each question was presented on a screen that needed to be answered before going on to the next screen with the next question. There was no guidance for the first-time user about what else would be asked or how many other questions there might be. My impression of this wizard is that it's a classic example of a process which makes perfect sense to the developer who knows all about the capabilities and format of the program, and which makes almost no sense to the new user who is just getting started. There are two modes to view your project in: timeline and presentation. Adding music to your slide apparently can be done only from the timeline perspective. I found this by trying the usual clicks, double clicks and right clicks while in the presentation mode and not being able to make the addition. At that point, I went to the help menu and through a couple of screens to get to the answer, which was to go to the timeline mode. One of my personal tests for well- designed software is that common functions should be achievable by intuitive actions rather than having to read the manual. Telling Stories responds: One of the central paradigms of the software is that all media is added in the timeline portion of the program. You can however assign a song associated with a different event to any slide in the presentation by using the "music and sounds" tab on the presentation and dragging the song from the media clipboard to the "current music with this slide" section.

Reviewer 3. The software will only run on a Windows 2000 or XP system. It will play back on any CD-ROM based system, so you do need some power to create your life history.

Reviewer 4. I would like to be able to specify the historical points that appear automatically on the time line. Although there are many World Events, about one-third are specifically US. In my case, I would take some of them out, and insert my own , perhaps related to my own country, or perhaps different ones. I can, of course, delete any that appear there on their own, and add ones of my own choosing. But, if I were to do several stories, I would like to choose my default events. On the Timeline page, you can insert a photo of the subject. I found out that, in order for the photo to fit its space, it needs to be already a full-size picture. There are no tools in the program to "stretch" the photo to fit. Finally, I suggest that the developers add either a users forum on their Web page, or provide a feedback option under the Help menu. This is quite a new program, and I hope that they will be open to suggestions from users. Telling Stories responds: We appreciate these suggestions and certainly intend to add a user's forum to our web site. We also want to vastly expand the historical content available to users and provide country specific content for localized versions of this product.


Other Comments.

Reviewer 1. I'm not sure I understand the statement This Product Key is valid for unlocking the software on your computer once, but taken at face value it's unacceptable. It would prevent a reinstall of my single copy on a the same computer - a fact of life in the PC world -or a transfer to different computer I needed to use. It would be very helpful to have 'Date' stamped and showing on Timeline balloons. Hit songs supplied go back only to 1970 and 1920 or earlier would be more appropriate, especially since they don't add to product cost. Telling Stories responds: Top Hits go back to 1950 (see Reviewer 4's comment above) the year that Billboard started charting the top hits. (You may note that they began by charting only the top 30 through 1955, then expanding to the top 50 in 1956, and beginning to chart the top 100 in 1959) Downloading desired songs from the Website proved impossible for me. Perhaps this was just a not-for-sale-from-here dead end , but why lead me there? Telling Stories responds: The internet music search is currently just a placeholder. We are working to establish a partnership with an online music provider to allow for a more seamless experience for downloading music. Once we have this partnership established we can change our server-side redirect and send user's to a more useful web site without the need for patching the client. I would have liked to be able to anchor top-to-bottom order of overlapping events on the timeline display; they seemed to percolate up and down at random or for reasons I could never pinpoint.

Reviewer 2. It would be useful to display a visual "sound level meter" on the "record voiceover" box to give feedback to the user that their voice was being recorded at an appropriate level. I attempted to record a message using my laptop's built-in microphone (something I rarely do) but only could play back a blank message. Having a meter display while recording would have helped me to troubleshoot whether the problem was in the recording or the playback.

Reviewer 3. After the editing is completed and the slide show is developed, play it back with a loved and take a sentimental trip down memory lane.

Reviewer 4. I would recommend that someone beginning with the program should let himself be led through the Quick Start Wizard, and perhaps even begin a story (most easily about himself). Play around with one or two events, to see what possibilities there are; try out the presentation and get an idea of the tools available there. Then they should go to the Help Menu, and read through the "Getting Started" section. Telling a complete story, even a simple one, is actually quite complicated. Getting Started suggests the best way to prepare yourself before you actually embark on a "real" story. Organization, here, will make your process much easier to do.


Will You Continue To Use It?

Reviewer 1. Only occasionally as it now stands with a single Timeline View.

Reviewer 2. No.

Reviewer 3. I will use it for my nephew's upcoming wedding and to document my own personal life. As time goes on, I am sure I can use it for other members of the family as they grow up and start their own lives. Starting today, I can continue to add to my life story, so yes, I will continue to use it.

Reviewer 4. Yes, especially when I get back to the family tree project.

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