What is Digital Chisel 1.2?

Digital Chisel is an entry-level multimedia tool designed especially for creating educational presentations. Like most authoring tools, this package lets you combine text, graphics, sounds, animation, and QuickTime movies into integrated, self-running presentations. But Digital Chisel also contains tools to create interactive quizzes and compile the results in a database. Unfortunately, the program’s decidedly nonMac interface can make designing presentations awkward and confusing.

Projects consist of screens, or slides. Digital Chisel includes a set of basic drawing and painting tools for creating layouts. You can create fields for text, which you type in or import. In addition you can add PICT graphics, AIFF sounds, and QuickTime movies to screens. You can navigate using the VCR-like controls on the navigation palette.

Overall, the Digital Chisel design tools operate in nonstandard ways. For example, when you select the paintbrush and click it on the screen, it doesn’t apply paint as you might expect; only after you drag out a rectangle does the paintbrush start acting like a paintbrush. The program has other weaknesses: there’s no zoom tool to change magnification; the paint palette includes a spray can, but you can’t adjust the flow of paint; many of the program’s menu commands, such as Reshape and Rotate, remain undimmed and accessible even when they can’t be used on a selected object. Also, adding text to screens is awkward; to add even a simple title, you have to draw a rectangular text field using the pointer, then switch to the browse tool before typing.

These failings aside. Digital Chisel comes equipped with some very appealing features. For example, you can use modes such as ghost, transparent, and reverse to create better-than-average graphic effects. The program’s library feature is also strong; you can import media files into a library and then add the files to a project simply by dragging them from the library palette onto a screen.

When you’re authoring a project, the program can be used in either normal mode or advanced-user mode. In normal mode, the program’s features are limited, while the advanced-user mode lets you tap into the real multimedia features, such as adding path animations.

Despite its weaknesses. Digital Chisel is an appealing tool for setting up interactive projects, thanks to a set of powerful, ready-to-use interactive templates that allow you to set up question-and-answer training projects without scripting or programming.

Each template is designed for a specific type of question — multiple choice, true or false, and so on — and has interactivity built in, so that you don’t have to set up individual button links. You replace the templates dummy text with your questions and answers and then select the correct answer for each question. When the project is played back in user playback mode, the program automatically grades the users’ responses.

Even better, you can set Digital Chisel to record user performance. You set up a database of user names and link it to the presentation. When a user launches a project. Digital Chisel records each answer, calculates the percentage of right answers, and even records the time it took for the user to complete the test.

The program’s quiz functions and other capabilities can be linked to create interactive effects. For example, you can set up a project so that if a user gives a wrong response to a question, the program jumps to a screen that provides additional information on the subject.

The Last Word

Due to its nonstandard interface. Digital Chisel takes longer to understand than entry-level multimedia tools such as Gold Disk’s Astound. But for authoring test-style educational programs, it’s a superb tool, with sophisticated interactive capabilities that are easy to manage and that can produce polished and professional results.

Schorr, Joseph. (June 1995). Digital Chisel 1.2. Macworld. (pgs. 71, 73).

Download Digital Chisel 1.2 for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II