I’ve been promising myself for a while now that I’d give the Phoenix Firestorm viewer (the Phoenix implementation of Viewer 2) a spin; this afternoon I did so, and have been mightily impressed. I’d reviewed the official Viewer 2 Beta around a year ago and while impressed by certain features–notably Shared Media–I’d been disappointed with the loss of some functions (‘Inspect’, for example, which I use when assessing student-created content), and have consequently stayed mostly with Emerald and its successor Phoenix throughout the past year. Firestorm, still in pre-alpha, incorporates all the best of Viewer 2 while improving somewhat on Viewer 2′s slightly clunky interface. I do, for example, like it that Firestorm by default retains the bottom bar familiar from Phoenix and other generation 1.xx.xx-style viewers.
The video below, from Jessica Lyon, head of the Phoenix Viewer team, gives a detailed overview of the the new viewer:
Download Firestorm for …
