The World Book Multimedia Encyclopedia has long been a terrific resource for Mac users in homes and at schools who want a detailed general reference resource. Now it’s first such resource to be released natively for Mac OS X.
At this week’s National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in Chicago, Ill., World Book and Apple are showing off the next major release of the multimedia encyclopedia, World Book 2002. Expected to be released this summer, the new version has been built from the ground up using Cocoa, Mac OS X’s native application framework.
The push to make World Book 2002 a Mac OS X native application was spurred by Software MacKiev, the Macintosh software conversion and development company that has worked with World Book to produce the Mac versions of the multimedia encyclopedia since 1998.
“We decided to do a Mac OS X version long before Mac OS X was released,” Software MacKiev spokesman Jack Minsky told MacCentral. “We offered to put in the manpower to get this done last October, and we’ve been working on it since then.”
The new World Book 2002 edition contains four distinct parts: the Main Encyclopedia, which contains articles, pictures and other multimedia content; Homework Wizards, which help prepare students for research, school reports, quizzes and tests; Surf the Millennium, a series of simulated Web sites in which students can learn about important historical figures and events from the past thousand years; and the World Book Notepad, a Mac OS X-native word processing application.
The 2 CD-ROM set will ship in July with a suggested retail price of US$59.95. More details will be available from the World Book Web site.
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