http://www.alice.org/index.php

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience.

Stop motion on the iPhone?

Once Apple opened up the iPhone (and iPod Touch, which has no camera, mic, speakers, GPS or cell radio) to 3rd-party applications, the flood of new apps has been dizzying.

For example, there are two hand-drawn animation apps: FlipBook and Flickbook. MacRumors has a brief note on those, and TUAW has a hands-on review of FlipBook.

More interesting to me is Watch It Change (which I think is a terrible name, but whatever)– a stop-motion animation app. Using the iPhone’s decent (but not spectacular) camera, WIC allows you to easily snap and assemble a sequence of footage. Naturally, you’re gonna want to mount the iPhone in some secure way. The makers of the app realize this, and provide a clever stand for sale on their website. TUAW has a video of the app in action.

With more cameras like the N95 getting video and application capabilities, it’ll be interesting to see if any of this catches on for animation. As we know, “The Corpse Bride” was shot using still cameras, so I don’t see why not, save for the fact they are tough to mount reliably.