Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Merry Stykzmas! Stykz is Finally Released to the Public


Well, it’s been a long period of development, but we finally got a public beta of Stykz out the door and available for you to download. Although “Stykz” is very familiar to *us*, this is probably the first time you’re reading about it. So here’s the backstory on how Stykz came to be developed:


Most of the Stykz testing team had been using Pivot on Windows for a long time, and were happy to work with an animation program that was easy to use. But there were many features that they had wished would be in Pivot, but the author had not updated Pivot since 2006. The lead engineer, however, was a cross-platform Flash and Revolution programmer who was used to hearing these complaints, started looking around for a better application, or one that could work on Macs.


After seeing the popularity of Pivot, and realizing that no one had developed a Mac version of a dedicated stick figure animation (SFA) program, the Stykz team was formed and we became committed to putting out a fun, easy to use SFA program that could be used on ALL platforms. So we decided to start with the Mac version, with the Windows and Linux ones to follow.


The first version of Stykz was designed to be a superset of Pivot, adding many of the features we’d wanted to see added to that program, but using a development tool that would allow us to quickly and easily output Stykz on multiple platforms.


We have great plans for future versions of Stykz (see the FAQ on the Stykz web site for a sampling of these), so make sure to send in your bug reports, comments, and suggestions to us as often as you like. You can use the forums, or send email directly to us from inside Stykz by using the “Send Feedback” menu item in the Help menu.


Enjoy!


The Stykz Development Team

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