PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Xara Web Designer 365: Conversation with Nova Fisher

  Nova Fisher has worked within communications with Xara for over 15 years. She has previously founded and managed some successful early-to-market businesses including an internet service provider (ISP) which was founded in 1994, and the creation of one of the earliest online web authoring solutions in 1996, that enabled anyone to create a professional website without the need for any design or technical skills.

In this interview, Nova talks about the new Xara Web Designer 365 product.

Geetesh: Nova, can you tell us more about Xara Web Designer 365, and who can use Web Designer 365 and benefit from its use?

Nova: Xara Web Designer is an ideal choice for novices as well as professional designers, in fact, anyone wanting a high-quality website, without the need-to-know HTML coding, scripting, or the usual technical jargon. The websites produced are compatible with all modern mobile and desktop browsers.

For commercial designers, the cloud-based editor, Xara Online Designer, that’s included gives controlled editing rights to their clients, allowing them to edit text and replace images and update their website, without needing to own or know anything about Web Designer (most small business owners have neither the time or inclination to learn web design).

Geetesh: Can you share what is new in this release of Xara Web Designer?

Nova: With the new Xara Web Designer 365 comes an Update Guarantee and 365 days free hosting and access to Xara Online Designer. Xara’s Update Guarantee means that users will no longer have to wait a year between releases to access new features and content. Users will have access to new features and content as Xara develops them, at any time during the year after their purchase.

The new release adds parallax scrolling, 30 other types of scroll animation, plus 40 new ‘on reveal’ animation types. The popular ‘sticky’ feature has also been enhanced so that items such as NavBars will stick to the top of the window when scrolling the page up.

Xara has also evolved its unique Xara SmartShapes concept to include more complex objects such as smart charts and photo grids. A SmartShape API will soon be available to third parties enabling developers to add new enhancements to Xara Web Designer. Those JavaScript SmartShape plug-ins will work with both the desktop Xara Web Designer and Xara Online Designer.

There are two new types of photo grids. ‘Static’ Photo Grids are simple, fixed, visually attractive grids of photos onto which users can drag & drop their own photo. ‘Smart’ Photo Grids smartly resize to fill the rectangles as photos are added or deleted, and users can swap the positions of the photos, adjust the number of rows and columns and the border / gap between all the photos.

The photo editing tools have also been enhanced, with a new ultra-easy way to rotate, scale/pan and crop – great for horizon straightening!

Another addition recognizes the popular trend of incorporating simple vector graphic symbols into websites, such as social media symbols, shopping cart or credit card symbols. The existing Font Awesome symbol collection has been supplemented with Google’s Material Design icons, providing integrated access to more than 1500 high-quality, professionally designed vector icons. And to find a symbol, there’s a new easy search function. The Xara Web Designer symbols can be inserted as editable vector graphics or inserted inline into text as a font (where they are automatically placed in a subset of symbols used, converted to WOFF, and included in the website HTML).

Xara Web Designer includes the cloud-based editor, Xara Online Designer. This gives Web Designer owners the flexibility to edit their Web Designer sites in a browser, from anywhere and with any device and sync their files with Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive. Xara Online Designer is still in beta but evolving rapidly with planned enhancements (which will be released under the 365 Update Guarantee) including more editing controls such as color, transparency, stack order, smart snap, and SmartShapes.

The combination of Web Designer and Online Designer means that Web Designer customers have the unique ability to edit their document both offline or online. Furthermore, it gives commercial designers using Web Designer the option to enable their clients to update their own website to edit text and replace photos. Client access is free.

See Also: Xara Product Reviews on Indezine

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

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Interviews, Nova Fisher, Xara

Play Options in Microsoft Sway

After you create a Sway, or even while you are editing, you can use the Preview Pane to see results. Yet, seeing a preview in a pane is no substitute for regular, full-screen viewing! To do the latter, you can use the Play option and enjoy your Sway in full-screen view. Follow these steps to explore along.

Explore Play options in Microsoft Sway.

Filed Under: Sway
Tagged as: Online Presentations, Sway, Tutorials

Interactive Narration for e-Learning: Conversation with Joel Harband

Joel Harband heads Tuval Software Industries, based in Israel. Their best-known product is Speech-Over Studio, a PowerPoint add-in that enables PowerPoint slides to incorporate narrations using automated voices.

In this conversation, Joel discusses interactive narration for e-Learning.

Geetesh: Joel, can you give us a quick introduction to Speech-Over? Then tell us more about i-Narration, and how does it work with Speech-Over.

Joel: Speech-Over is a PowerPoint add-in that produces and manages effective and compelling voice-over narration, together with subtitles and lecture notes, that is automatically synchronized with PowerPoint visual animations to achieve the effect of a live presenter. Its main application is narrating PowerPoint-based training and e-learning courses and web presentations and interfaces with e-learning products like Camtasia®, iSpring®, and Articulate®. Speech-Over can use both real voices and text-to-speech voices in any combination. The TTS option eliminates all microphone recording, saving substantial time and costs in development. Speech-Over is able to make any TTS voice sound more realistic and effective with its SAPI narration text editor.

Now I’ll tell you about the new e-learning technology we call i-Narration or Interactive Narration. The motivation for developing i-Narration came from the objections voiced by experts about the way narration has been used in e-learning: a fixed-speed continuous narration on a slide constrains learners to a fixed learning pace and to a fixed order of topics making them passive and sometimes frustrated learners. i-Narration empowers individual learners by giving them control over the pace of the narration and the order of topics—turning passive e-learning into active e-learning with better understanding and retention. i-Narration gives the learner the powerful benefits of narration without the negatives.

With i-Narration, course designers break up or segment the slide narration into sections or logical units where each narration section is associated with a visual topic heading, text bullet, or graphic on the slide.

An audio control-bar—modeled after the familiar Windows Media Player control bar lets learners access the narration either sequentially or interactively. The play button plays all narration sections on the slide in order, sequentially, as a learner might prefer when learning the material the first time.

The skip and restart/rewind buttons let the learner access the material interactively, skip sections of the narration and concentrate on others, go backward and forwards and repeat sections, as a learner might prefer when reviewing the material.

The audio control also lets learners vary the rate of speaking of the narration to match their rate of learning.

Subtitles are displayed on the screen as the narration is spoken and the complete narration text for the slide is available in the notes pane for those who prefer it.

Now, let us explore how this i-Narration works with Speech-Over. Developers use Speech-Over in PowerPoint to produce narration segments that are associated with topic headings, text bullets, or graphics on the slide, and that play in their sequence. The narration segments, together with the subtitles and the narration text notes for the slide, are then imported to Storyline from PowerPoint.

We’ve developed a Storyline template for i-Narration which includes the audio control bar and layers and triggers for the narration effects. After the Speech-Over narration is imported into the Storyline template, developers just need to copy the narration and subtitle effects to the appropriate layers and the i-Narration will work.

For more detailed information and access to developer resources please visit our site.

Geetesh: Why did you choose Articulate Storyline to deliver this i-Narration initiative? Also, do you plan to interact this technology with other e-Learning products?

Joel: Articulate Storyline with its layers and triggers was built for interactivity in e-learning and it has a good interface with PowerPoint and so was a natural choice for implementing i-Narration.

We are checking other e-Learning products to see if we can extend this technology to them as well.

See Also: Speech-Over 5: Conversation with Joel Harband | Speech-Over Professional: Conversation with Joel Harband

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: Add-in, Interviews, Joel Harband, PowerPoint, Speech-Over

Tweet Cards in Microsoft Sway

Cards in Sway are essentially containers for your content. To place your Twitter content in Sway, or even a tweet from someone else, you will first need to insert a Tweet Card. Add a new Tweet Card to your Storyline. To do so, select the Tweet card option within the Media cards category. You will end up with the Tweet Card added to your Storyline.

Learn how you can use Tweet Cards in Microsoft Sway.

Filed Under: Sway
Tagged as: Cards, Media Cards, Online Presentations, Sway, Tutorials, Twitter

Overcoming Visual Clichés with Visual Clichés!

We have discussed visual clichés in the past. The idea has been to explain how you can overcome these visual clichés by using the four principles of:

1. Thinking creative,
2. Thinking profound,
3. Thinking logical, and finally
4. Thinking again.

In a recent case study on clichés, we spoke about how everyone thinks about a light bulb when they need to express a bright idea. In fact, a search on Google Images for the term, “bright idea” singularly returns only visuals of light bulbs!

Recently, a picture featuring an unusually large number of light bulbs was noticed in an Accenture advertisement. Strangely, this did not seem clichéd. Why did this happen? Why did the cliché go away?

Is that because there is a way of overcoming a visual cliché, and that is to go overboard with the actual cliché itself! As they say, there is safety in numbers. Do too many instances of the same cliché make it a pattern? And do patterns make clichés insignificant? That’s something interesting, and can help you when you have few options to go beyond a visual cliché.

Patterns are created using multiple instances. Why do multiple instances of the same cliché negate each other? The answer to that question may be the fact that poison kills poison—at least this last metaphor of poison killing poison is very well known in the Orient and in India.

In the Mahabharata, an Indian epic, there is the story of Duryodhana, who planned to kill his cousin Bhima. He tried to execute this plan by poisoning Bhima’s food. And then, when Bhima fainted as a result, Duryodhana threw him into a nearby river. Poisonous snakes in the river bit Bhima, and this poison negated the poison that Bhima had earlier consumed. Thus, Bhima swam up the river and survived to one day kill Duryodhana!

And it seems like this poison kills poison metaphor may work with clichés too! One cliché may get negated with multiple instances of the same cliché.

So, is it possible that you can overcome a cliché by going overboard? That’s food for thought! We have found that this approach can work sometimes, but only if implemented thoughtfully and tastefully.

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: Pictures and Visuals
Tagged as: Clichés, Design, Graphics, Ideas, Opinion