Astound has always been among the best presentation tools, allowing you to create sophisticated multimedia presentations without grappling with complex scripts. Version 2.0 lets you build presentations with a higher level of interactivity, more animation, and better sound and graphics.
Astound presentations consist of any combination of text, graphics, QuickTime movies, and sounds — including a broad range of importable graphics and sound formats. Each text block, picture, or movie can appear or vanish using one of 30 transitional effects, including dissolve, reveal, and fade. Slides can also contain buttons that play sounds or movies, or allow you to jump between slides, open other presentations, or launch other programs.
In version 2.0, you can add objects that have self-contained animations — called Actors — to spice up business presentations. The program comes with 19 ready-to-use Actors, and animations created in other applications can also serve as Actors. Like all elements, Actors can enter and exit slides using transitions and path animations.
To ease integration of these elements, Astound has added a floating tool palette that offers quick access to options previously available only through menu commands. You can click on palette icons for transition and path-animation dialog boxes, and you can set attributes for objects and text blocks using pop-up menus.
Unfortunately, although this palette is generally convenient, it sometimes failed to display the correct name and point size of the font selected. It’s also ugly. Font names and point sizes are displayed in Monaco and the default font for text objects is permanently set to Chicago.
Astound's new version offers improved drawing tools, including a texture generator for custom backgrounds. The Extrude command turns shapes into 3-D objects with custom-defined perspective, angle, light source, and depth.
As round’s new Tween command creates animated, morph like transitions. Select two objects as starting and ending points, and Astound instantly creates a fluid animated sequence show ing the first object melting into the second.
Astounds audio features have grown, too. For the first time, you can add sounds that play continuously across multiple slides for a background soundtrack.
Even with these changes, much about Astound has stayed the same in this upgrade. The set of transitional effects for individual objects is virtually unchanged, the number of transitions available to move between slides hasn’t grown, and path-animation features haven’t improved. It would have been nice to see some better animation features and transitions, but even without them, the upgrade is more than worthwhile.
Aside from the flaky floating palette, the only other noteworthy problem with Astound was its failure to import some TIFF files correctly. Converting the files to PICT format — as suggested in the documentation — took care of the problem.
The Last Word
Astound 2.0’s features are so innovative that it’s possible to overlook its interface problems. Astound doesn't even really fit comfortably in the same category as PowerPoint or Persuasion; it’s a fullfledged multimedia-authoring tool that makes simple work of producing memorable presentations.
Schorr, Joseph. (March 1996). Astound 2.0. Macworld. (pg. 73).
Gold Disk
Applications
out of 10 (1 vote)
8 / 
2021-12-03 / 
b638f730c0457fdf9537f5040f0362b48ec014ae / 
/ 
Astound_2_disks.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
