James Bannan20 July 2006, 1:41 AM
Bad news for users of Microsoft's free Photostory animated slideshow app: its development is being discontinued because bits of it are being built in to Vista.
Microsoft is building better creative tools into Vista, but the tradeoff is that it will no longer release any new versions of the popular free Photostory app for creating photo slideshows.
In a previous blog I was looking at Vista’s DVD Maker - one of its features is to take digital images and turn them into a slideshow with music backing.
I noticed that the end effect was pretty much the same as Microsoft Photostory, an application designed specifically for creating picture slideshows.
The downside of DVD Maker is that it doesn’t give you the same degree of control and customisation as Photostory does.
So, I was wondering what the future of Photostory was likely to be, and put the question to Microsoft.
Microsoft Australia got back to me with the following answer:
“Microsoft will not be releasing a Windows Vista version of Photostory, however it has focused on delivering the scenarios that people were actually using in new, integrated ways with Windows Vista. Microsoft is continuing to work on more scenarios, but it is too early to release any details about future plans.”
The functionality of Photostory will be taken over by three separate Vista features - Photo/Video Slideshow, DVD Maker and Movie Maker.
The Slideshow function is a one-click method to instantly create an image slideshow on the computer screen.
It incorporates the usual pan/zoom effects we’ve all come to know and sometimes love. You don’t get any feature options - just open a folder with pictures in it and hit SlideShow. If you want music playing, get that started first!
I’ve covered DVD maker previously. The individual slideshows it creates are essentially chapters on a DVD. Backing music can be added, but transitions can only be customised very simplistically … it's an all-or-nothing approach.
Movie Maker 6.0 on Windows Vista is the next version up from Windows XP, which had version 5.1.
Movie Maker has always had the capability to create Photostory-like slideshows, it just takes more effort as it’s a more involved application.
In the grand scheme of things, Photostory’s fate is neither here nor there. I like it because it’s a good example of a simple application created to perform a particular function, which it does exceedingly well.
Seeing that app pulled apart and subsumed into disparate parts of the OS raises the question - is it better to have an add-on application which does the job, or to have its functionality (but not the app) embedded in the OS by default?
Personally I think it’s better to have the app to get the job done. Apart from anything else, it's more conventional to update an app with new functionality than add it to an operating system. Will we have to wait for a new version of Windows before getting any update to the
However, I believe that users will really like Vista’s digital presentation capabilities. Microsoft have done a damn good job with this facet of consumer computing.