Flash Toolbar: Conversation with Colin McBride

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Colin McBride is from in-shop, a UK-based company that creates Flash Toolbar, a Flash-related add-in for PowerPoint. Colin says he has a passion for doing things right, and he always thinks of the words spoken by JFK we chose to go because it is difficult.

When asked for a photo for this conversation, Colin sent an image of his trip to Tibet rather than a conventional headshot. As he said, this sums him more.

Colin in Tibet

Geetesh: Tell us more about in-shop and your custom PowerPoint solutions.

Colin: The in-shop has been set up to create user-friendly software which is both professionally developed and reasonably priced. We have begun with a range of software add-ins for Microsoft PowerPoint. Later, we plan to extend this range to include other software utilities. We have used our experience working with some of the world’s leading companies, our typical corporate client has anywhere between 25,000 to 150,000 employees spread across the globe, and from this work we have developed rigorously tested, secure and user-friendly software solutions. This makes our software the ideal choice for both individuals and corporations.

The Flash Toolbar is a good example of this, it has always been time consuming and difficult to do simple things with a Flash movie in PowerPoint, e.g. insert a Flash movie, change the play setting, change the background color of Flash movies etc. But why? We felt that it does not need to be this difficult, so we decided to create an easy-to-use solution directly within the PowerPoint program.

Geetesh: Tell us more about Flash Toolbar — particularly the export static slides feature. How did that come about and how can it help?

Colin: The Flash Toolbar is a professionally produced tool that allows you to work more easily with Flash movies within PowerPoint presentations. It has been designed both for individual use and/or corporate use, once installed it displays a toolbar with a range of easy-to-use tools, and with a single-click you can insert a Flash movie or change its settings. In addition, it automatically fixes the problems commonly know as flashback, which is when Flash movies do not automatically rewind.

Flash Toolbar

A key tool for many users, especially business users is the Create Static Image Slide tool. Many sales and business presentations use Flash movies to show their products and services within a PowerPoint presentation, this gives a real wow factor. However, without our solution when using Flash movies in PowerPoint they are left with the problem of not being able to print the scenes or stills from the Flash movie, or, they cannot e-mail the presentation (this can be for a range of reasons, e.g. size, email server security, they don’t know if their client uses Flash etc.)

The Create Static Image Slide tool on the Flash Toolbar resolves these problems/issues by making it simple for the user to change Flash movies used in PowerPoint into a series of static images. Our tool creates a range of new slides, where each slide is a duplicate of the original slide, and the Flash movie is replaced with a still or frame from the Flash movie which are JPEG images.

So, for example, if you have a PowerPoint presentation which uses a Flash movie to show The six steps of a new wonder product, our tool allows you to select the Flash movie and with a single click create six new slides, each showing a scene or still from the Flash movie.

You can learn more about Flash Toolbar in Indezine’s full review of the product.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.