Project Tuva Updated

We released a new version of Project Tuva (previously) last week. There isn’t really a news feed for the project, so I’ll have to tell you about it here.

Project Tuva was designed for use by students, and one of the big learning features is the ability to take notes on a video. These notes are synced to the video timeline, and restored when you come back to the app. However they’re only available from the browser they were entered on. This release has improved the situation a bit.

Now, you can export any notes you’ve entered to a plain text file and use it for later study. Better, you can import those notes back into Tuva on another computer. Even better, you can import them in the context of a commentary track for the video. This means that students can share notes with each other, and professors can create their own commentary tracks for their students.

Some other improvements:

• The app now targets Silverlight 3, which is required for file exports.
• Uses the not-quite-released SmoothStreamingMediaElement control, for even smoother video playback.
• Video playback is now hardware-accelerated. (Always on Windows, only in full-screen on OS X.)

Most of the development work on this was performed by Joel Pryde, with a little support from me.