High Achiever Chemistry Review

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(More customer reviews)I just installed and tried this software and am surprised that the other reviewer gave it five stars. It does indeed have a lot of content, but your access to that content is slowed by the interface, which was designed for much simpler computers, in an era when people were less familiar with technology.
To "enter" the program you get a cute animation into a sort of tunnel place where a control panel drops down, with sound effects. You can click on Content, and get a menu of many familiar topics appropriate for the study of chemistry. So far so good, but pretty soon you find that this old interface is slowing your access to the material.
For instance, a typical screen has either about 50-100 words of text, or perhaps 30 words plus an illustration of some kind. Paragraphs are sometimes interrupted in mid-sentence, and to move forward requires clicking on a navigation icon in the bottom corner of the screen. Seriously -- no use of the arrow keys, the page-up or page-down keys. I experimented, and in fact not one single key on the keyboard is active -- except the Escape key, which dumps you *completely* out of the program.
Moreover, each new screen of text appears via an animated "wipe" from the center outward. Not a scroll downward, which would make more sense -- or better yet, just a fresh screen. The transition takes only a half-second but after a while it is really tedious, since it is so utterly unnecessary. Somebody should have told the animator "No!" when they saw that device in the design specs.
I wish I could put a screen shot here, but try to imagine a multimedia program that would have been state-of-the-art back around 1995 or so. At least 1/3 of the screen real estate is taken up with big, graphic icons for things like Navigate, Bookmark, Print, Play Sound, and so on. That's partly why so little text can fit.
Confused? Too bad. The Help icon gets you nothing but a reference to a website where there is only a link to PCTreasures, the current distributor of this program. If you get creative and try the "xpressionsmedia" website, you can buy the software there but you'll still find no help for it. No documentation or manual anywhere, no Help in the program itself, and no Help online.
That's pretty disappointing, but still isn't deadly because the software is reasonably intuitive and -- in my brief tests so far -- bugfree, running under Windows XP. A big plus for some users is that the software does not demand much horsepower. I got it running fine on a 400Mhz Pentium-II and the package says it would even run with a 233Mhz Pentium and Win98. The other reviewer here says it runs on Vista, so one might conclude that it is pretty well-behaved software.
Like many older programs, it does not know how to run in a window, but takes up the whole screen (without filling it edge-to-edge, which is a bit frustrating). So you can alternate between it and other programs easily enough, but you can't look at this and anything else simultaneously.
The program has quite a few animations to explain different principles, which makes up -- somewhat -- for the painfully slow and inefficient access to the text. Most of the information is in the text, so it is hard for me to imagine reading through this whole thing, clicking and clicking.
The other reviewer commented on its usefulness in test mode and for reviewing, and I suppose the value depends on what you're looking for. Now that we have this program on hand, maybe we'll refer to it now and then for specific topics. I just can't imagine using it as the core learning tool. A good book would be better.
If one prefers (or needs) an interactive, multimedia way of learning Chemistry from scratch, I'd wish for a program as friendly as this one but much, much more modern, with faster access to the content, *more* of that content, better navigation, and proper Help. I'd be inclined to look for such a program and pay the extra money that it will certainly cost.
In summary, this program is mostly suitable for people who have very old PCs and who can't run newer, more demanding software. The content seems to be accurate and reasonably thorough, so if you are absolutely broke and just have to have software, well I guess you get your money's worth with this program. But in my view, you don't get *more* than your money's worth, so I would not think of this as a great bargain. It is what it is.
For the inadequacy of the interface and the total lack of documentation or Help, I might give it two stars, maybe even one. But for all the decent content and nice little animations, and for being useable on older PCs, it would deserve more. So, three stars it is.

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