PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Wildform Flair: Conversation with Colby Devitt

  Colby Devitt is the president and co-founder of Wildform, a multimedia software company based out of Los Angeles, USA. In this conversation, Colby discusses Flair, their Flash authoring product that includes a dedicated PowerPoint to Flash converting component.

Geetesh: Tell us more about Flair and its PowerPoint to Flash converting capabilities.

Colby: Flair is a fantastic all-around program for people who want to author in Flash, but don’t want to take the time to learn or pay for Flash. (That said, we also have plenty of customers who are Flash developers who use Flair to supplement their work in Flash.) Flair is primarily designed for people who want to create multimedia and e-learning presentations. It includes a top-of-the-line PowerPoint to Flash converter, which consistently creates high-quality conversions with small file sizes. Plus, you can edit your converted PowerPoint files within the Flair editing environment, which is a huge advantage.

Geetesh: Flair is much more than a PowerPoint to Flash conversion program. However, can you highlight how Flair differs from other PowerPoint to Flash converting solutions?

Colby: You’re right — Flair is much more than a PowerPoint to Flash converter. Flair has multiple essential presentation capabilities in one program. It’s a Flash authoring tool, a video, image, and audio converter, a text effects animator, a quiz creator, and a full video and screen recorder (like Camtasia), in addition to being a full PowerPoint to Flash converter. Each of these capabilities in Flair could be a full program in itself.

The PowerPoint to Flash converter by itself is considered to be the best on the market. It creates high-quality conversions with small file sizes and is the only converter that I know of that lets you edit your PowerPoint files after you import them into Flair. This is a huge convenience for people working with multiple PowerPoint files because it lets you combine pieces from different PowerPoint files or edit the content of your inherited PowerPoint files before converting them to Flash. It also lets you use your existing PowerPoint templates and designs in Flair projects.

One of the reasons we created this all-in-one program called Flair was that our customers not only wanted to convert PowerPoint to Flash, but they also wanted to add multimedia elements and interactivity to their presentations. Flair is unique because it lets you create a lot of things you either cannot make at all or can’t make easily in PowerPoint. For example, Flair has a wizard that lets you combine and synchronize your video and PowerPoint files in three steps! People love this feature. Again, no other product on the market does this.

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.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Colby Devitt, Interviews, PowerPoint, PowerPoint Flash, Wildform

SmartDraw 2009.5: The Indezine Review

SmartDraw has been long a mainstay of those who want to create professional-looking graphics fast and easy. And although PowerPoint and other Microsoft Office applications include many info-graphic options, they continue to lack several business graphic options such as mindmaps, storyboards, flowcharts, etc. SmartDraw has traditionally filled in these gaps, but now it has started offering more than just the gaps.

We look at the new SmartDraw 2009.5, especially the new Microsoft Office-oriented interoperability features in this review.

Read the Indezine review of SmartDraw 2009.5.

Filed Under: Reviews
Tagged as: Graphics, Microsoft Office, PowerPoint, SmartDraw

SlideSix: Conversation with Todd Sharp

Todd Sharp is the creator of SlideSix, an online presentation sharing community site. He has been programming in ColdFusion since mid-2004 and blogs regularly about ColdFusion and Ajax at his site C F Silence. Todd provides ColdFusion/Ajax development and consulting services through his company, Sharp Interactive, LLC.

In this discussion, Todd discusses his SlideSix site.

Geetesh: Tell us more about SlideSix and how it evolved.

Todd: Just over a year ago, in December of 2007, I decided to experiment with ColdFusion’s dynamic presentation capabilities by integrating them with a well-known Java API called Apache POI, which allows you to read and extract text and objects from PowerPoint 97/2000/XP files. Using the Java API was extremely simple by leveraging ColdFusion’s ability to easily integrate with Java.

I created a few test cases and was very excited about the potential for creating dynamic, Flash-based presentations. So, through that experimentation, the idea for SlideSix was born. Over the next six months, I set out to create a presentation-sharing community and finally launched it on May 1, 2008.

The initial launch led to the realization that Apache POI wasn’t quite ‘ready for prime time’. It was fun to experiment with, but the presentation conversion simply would not be sufficient to handle anything more than a simple presentation with very little formatting. I quickly realized that I would need to utilize a different conversion engine and switched to utilizing OpenOffice to convert the presentations. Using OpenOffice gave me the added advantage of being able to support a wider array of presentation formats like the OpenOffice format (ODP, SXI) as well as MS PowerPoint (PPT, PPS). There are other techniques I use to support the conversion of additional formats, such as Adobe Acrobat (PDF), QuickTime (MOV), and PowerPoint 2007 (PPTX).

In addition to the conversion engine, there have been numerous enhancements to the user interface. For example, our presentation viewer and user management console are both newer additions that are built with Adobe Flex.

Since the launch, I have been constantly looking to improve and enhance the site to become one of the world’s premier online presentation sharing communities.

Geetesh: How is SlideSix different from other online slide and presentation sharing sites, and what is SlideSix’s best feature, according to you?

Todd: SlideSix has many features that differentiate it from other presentation-sharing communities. First and foremost, we try to keep our site extremely simple. Some other sites put too much focus on being a social network. We focus on being a multimedia-enabled presentation sharing community. In other words, we realize the focus of the site is our users’ presentations, and we try to empower our users to create a unique identity for themselves. The most powerful feature that we offer to help our users create that identity is the ability to record video or audio directly within our management console. Once recorded, the media becomes embedded directly within the presentation. We also offer the ability to embed supporting documentation directly within your presentation (by uploading data in ZIP format) and embedded slide notes. Other familiar features are also available, such as RSS feeds, groups, favorites, tagging, ranking, and much more.

Our About page contains a comprehensive overview of our features and even has a sample multimedia presentation.

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.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Interviews, Online Presentations, PowerPoint, PowerPoint Flash, SlideSix

PowerPoint Design Wish List

We came across this interesting blog post by Andrew Dlugan that’s actually an open letter to the PowerPoint programming (development) team. It talks about making some changes to the program, and we do agree with several of them. About those we don’t agree with, those are mainly wishes to curtail how the program operates by providing users with less options for transitions, words, and color. That’s like debating the intelligence of users.

We like the requests that pertain to including Nancy Duarte‘s book, slide:ology with every copy of PowerPoint. But asking everyone to pay for visuals and give Microsoft a cut? Well, that’s a no-no. Lots of PowerPoint users are students, teachers, and churches that cannot afford to pay for every graphic that they use on a slide.

Andrew’s opinions form a great starting point, and the comments on the page prove that!

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.

Filed Under: Companion Programs
Tagged as: Andrew Dlugan, Design, Nancy Duarte, Opinion, PowerPoint

SlideBoom Announces Pro Accounts

SlideBoom, an online presentation viewing and sharing site, announced the availability of Pro accounts that add more options than what are available to existing Free accounts.

These extra options include:

• A personalized Slidelog web page without ads. Can be branded as required.
• Customizable compact, medium, and advanced players.
• Private Sharing secured with SSL.
• Offline presentation distribution as Flash files and Windows/Mac projectors.
• Control over image compression and audio bitrates.
• Increased upload limit.

More info can be found on the SlideBoom site.

Filed Under: Companion Programs
Tagged as: Companion Programs, Delivery, Online Presentations, PowerPoint, PowerPoint Flash, SlideBoom