What is Storybook Weaver Deluxe?

Storybook Weaver Deluxe is an entertaining, creative educational tool for children ages 6 to 12. This CD-ROM-based picture-book-design program lets kids assemble elaborate illustrations, using backgrounds and clip art, and write stories to accompany the illustrations, it’s a fun, flexible package that nourishes creativity.

Kids create their stories using a tool bar. The tool bar’s buttons provide access to the story ingredients, plus tools to edit the images. For example, clicking on the Scenery button brings up a window that contains all the backgrounds; you scroll through this window to select one. Backgrounds range from realistic outdoor scenes to castles and outer space. An object window contains images to place over the backgrounds, including adults, kids, real and fictional animals, vehicles, and objects.

While you can’t edit scenery, you can edit images. You can easily enlarge, shrink, flip, and layer objects from the tool bar. You can also change skin tones and the color of objects and clothing.

You edit images using the pencil and eraser tools in the image-editing area of Storybook Weaver. But the product lacks the more-flexible paint tools, such as the ability to adjust the pencil’s weight and pattern, that many graphics packages offer. Computer-savvy kids may be used to those functions in other applications, so their omission here is a shame.

You can also associate sounds (such as a dog barking or a phone ringing) and music with a story. The sounds are represented by icons, though, and the choices are sometimes confusing. (A car for baroque music? It must have made sense to someone.)

After you create your story select some text and the Speak option from the Goodies menu, and Story-book Weaver reads the text aloud. You can choose one of four different voices as your reading partner.

The program allows you to change menu items and dialog boxes to Spanish via a Preferences option. The Windows version reads highlighted text aloud in Spanish; according to MECC, the Macintosh version speaks Spanish properly only if Apple’s PlainTalk is installed.

Finding help with Storybook Weaver is easy. It comes with a built-in help system and a clearly written, well-illustrated manual. The program includes a thesaurus and spelling checker, but it doesn’t offer other story-writing helpers.

Story-book Weaver’s main limitation is its delivery-method: CD-ROMs are slow, and kids may find the program’s speed frustrating (in my story, it took about five seconds to move from one page to the next).

The Last Word Storybook Weaver isn’t much more than a word processor with clip art and sounds. But it encourages kids to develop their writing skills and creativity, and that makes it a worthwhile educational product. If I were a parent. I’d buy it for my offspring.

Pearlstein, Joanna. (May 1995). Storybook Weaver Deluxe 1.0. Macworld. (pg. 83).

Download Storybook Weaver Deluxe for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.1 up to Mac OS 10.4

Compatibility notes

Minimum Requirements

• MC68030 processor
• 5 MB RAM (8 MB recommended)
• 640 x 480, 8-bit color display
• CD-ROM drive
• System 7.1

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II