Robin Good: Microsoft Research has recently released its own authoring tool to create cinemagraphs, by utilizing short video clips in which, only an element is kep "alive", while all others are rendered as a traditional still photo.
From Wikipedia: "Cinemagraphs are still photographs in which a minor and repeated movement occurs. Cinemagraphs, which are usually published in an animated GIF format, can give the illusion that the viewer is watching a video.
My comments: Cinemagraphs / cinemagrams is a new emerging visual art form with great potential. It captures "moments" in a unique way, providing a new exciting and infinite exploratory space for the artist/author creating it. I'd recommend it as a "core" topic in all visual communication courses. Start experimenting with it yourself on your PC with this very tool from Microsoft, or on your iPad/iPhone with Cinemagr.am
Robin Good: Easy2maps in a web app which allows you to create your own fully customized Google map by placing information pins on your selected Google map view.
Easy2maps can be utilized to map your business, a set of events or an enogastronomic itinerary.
The free version allows you place up to 5 personalized "pins" on your map to identify specific locations. Each pin can be customized to contain the type of information you want. Pins can be also searched and used to customize the type of info displayed on a map.
A set of ready-map templates is available and final maps can be embedded on any web site or blog.
Robin Good: Here is a useful guide to 25 free audio editors, both for PC and Mac, which can solve most of your problems when it comes to audio editing, conversion and recording.
The mini-reviews are not super, but the collection per se is quite useful indeed.
The guide also includes some nifty digital instruments and tools like Hydrogen (for Linux) fro drumpad programming, the Kangas Sound Editor to create music and sound effects, AudioCutter which is very useful to split large MP3 files.
P.S.: Unfortunately the short reviews (some of which are a bit incomplete) fail to specify which apps are for PC and which for Mac, but you can derive - in many cases - it by looking at the screenshots
Robin Good: ProShow Web is a free web app which allows you to upload your preferred images and video clips to create fancy-looking video slideshows.
The free service provides hundreds of music tracks that can be used without additional cost to score your visual creation.
You can customize the slideshow visually by utilizing one of the many ready-made templates already available, and by selecting the order of images and clips, adding transitions, effects and text information.
The final video (which remains always "editable" in your account) can be easily uploaded to YouTube, shared on Facebook or downoaded in your preferred format and video resolution.
A "Pro" version is available that provides more features and higher quality outputs.
Robin Good: Wink 2.0 is a free downloadable presnetation tool that works both on PCs and Linux computers.
"Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc).
Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users."
Key features include:
-> Audio: Record voice as you create the tutorial for explaining better.
-> Input formats: Capture screenshots from your PC, or use images in BMP/JPG/PNG/TIFF/GIF formats.
-> Output formats: Macromedia Flash, Standalone EXE, PDF, PostScript, HTML or any of the above image formats. Use Flash/html for the web, EXE for distributing to PC users and PDF for printable manuals.
-> Multilingual support: Works in English, French, German, Italian, Danish, Spanish, Serbian, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified/Traditional Chinese.
-> Smart Capture Tools: Capture screenshots automatically as you use your PC, based on mouse and keyboard input (great time saver and generates professional captures).
-> Performance/Quality: Creates highly compressed Flash presentations (few kbs to few hundreds of kbs, much smaller than competing commercial products) ideal for using on the web.
Robin Good: Tilen is a free downloadable software for Mac and PC that allows you to easily slice any image into any number of image slices all saved separately.
Tilen can save tiles in JPEG, PSD, BMP, PNG, TARGA, or SGI formats, and open many more.
Tilen will run on Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher, or Windows 2000 and higher. Tilen requires Apple QuickTime to be installed. Tilen runs natively on both PowerPC and Intel Macs."
Robin Good: If you are looking for a free and simple alternative to SlideShare you may want to give a look to this new free presentation sharing service which allows you to upload PowerPoint and PDF files without much hussle.
Presentations can be viewed in full screen, shared on social media, tagged and categorized, and made available for download if so desired.
The service looks clean, simple to use, and promising. (I needed one).
N.B.: There is hardly any information on the site, "About", and "Learn More" links are not working, so be prudent before uploading your whole library here.
Update: As I have just learned from a timely email (who wrote me as am writing this very Scoop - without knowing it) from Julian working on the development team, the only reason is that the service is just brand new... so, just give them time... and lots of feedback.
Robin Good: StatSilk offers a set of free downloadable software tools to create professional-looking stat and trend charts.
StatPlanet can be used to create anything from basic interactive maps to advanced infographics.
StatTrends is tailored to create interactive graphs and charts.
Key features include:
-> Multiple graphing and charting types
-> Select countries by clicking on them in the world map or country selection window. Statistics and details for the country selected are displayed inside popups and visualization components.
-> Animate changes over time
-> Zoom into map regions
-> Hide or reveal details - Change the level of detail by hiding or revealing interface components, country names or statistics.
-> Customize the colors and value ranges of maps
and graphs.
-> Export maps for use in other applications or publications.
Robin Good: SoftMaker Presentations is the presentation graphics program available inside SoftMaker Office 2012 – a Windows-and-Linux-only suite of applications that is fully compatible with Microsoft PowerPoint (and Office).
SoftMaker Presentations replicates all of the classic Powerpoint functionalities while adding powerful efects, animations and transitions.
SoftMaker Presentations lets you create any kind of presentation, be it a slideshow, a video or a collection of HTML pages, and to pass it around as a PowerPoint file.
Key features include:
-> Opens and saves PPT and PPTX files of Microsoft PowerPoint 97 to 2010 faithfully, including those with password protection
-> Font embedding ensures that presentations retain their fonts even when viewed on other computers
-> PDF file output of slides, outlines, handouts, and notes
-> Design templates give you impressive results fast.
-> Animations and slide transitions
- > Hundreds of object and text animations available
-> Ready-made animation schemes that animate entire presentations at once
-> Insert movie and sound files
-> Outliner
-> Interactive presentation of slide shows with virtual pen and highlighter
Robin Good: Present.Me is a web app which allows you to easily combine your presentation with your own talking head video, in perfect sync.
First you upload your image slides or presentation file (PowerPoint, PDF, Excel, Word, OpenOffice or Google Docs) and then you can record your video from your webcam while playing back the slides at your own preferred pace. You can also pause and restart any time.
Present.me now features a "trim" function allowing you to cut out mistakes and errors you have made and allows to create also presentations with your audio only (no video).
The final presentation can be shared online on all major social networks or embedded in any site or blog.
There is both a free plan, allowing for up to 3 presentations of 15 mins, as well as paid plans costing $9 (30 presentations of 60 mins and no ads) and $39/month (unlimited).
Robin Good: A short video doodle illustrating how five underconsidered factors have tremendous impact on the quality of your presentations, whether online or live.
"Great presenters understand how people think, learn, and react. In this video Dr. Weinschenk shares 5 Things from her book, "100 Things Every Presenter Needs To Know About People".
What is interesting here is that the video is in perfect sync with the audio - this is why it is so powerful..
More critically, something is missing from the video: a summary. The author summarizes with "So there you have it, five things you need to know about people in order to give a better presentation", followed by a rapid zoom out revealing briefly ALL the pictures from the storyboard - too many and too fast to be of use as a memory prop.
Five may be a small number, but for our limited memory - it is huge. We have to remember five more or less disconnected ideas: 20 minute chunks, eye competes with ear, your speech is only a part of whole message (see nice screen illustration at time 3:36), call them to action, people imitate your feelings. It feels like a bullet list. The video could have brought back 5 key images corresponding to the 5 points to help anchor them in our memory.
This is why I recommend that the "take-away" slide, a.k.a. the conclusion or summary slide, refreshes people's memory by bringing back small pictures of the key visuals of the presentation next to the text points that they helped make. It does not matter if they are not fully readable, their role is simply to jog memory.
Robin Good: ShowPoint is a free downloadable software from Microsoft which gives you the ability to distribute and auto-launch any PowerPoint presentation to a set of remote PCs.
From the official site: "ShowPoint is a tool to enables you to send over a presentation to another computer and start its slide show automatically.
ShowPoint will continuously monitor a specified folder on a file server.
You can open a presentation from another computer in the network and edit the content.
Key features:
-> Edit an existing presentation with new content and by saving this you are making this presentation visible for all computers running ShowPoint.
-> Automatic distribution of new and updated presentations between the file server and the viewing computer.
-> ShowPoint starts automatically the slide show whenever a new presentation comes in."
For Windows PCs only.
Free.
P.S.: Doesn't work with the free Powerpoint viewer.
Robin Good: Paper by FiftyThree is a new iPad app which transforms the device in a paper sketchpad where you have simple but very powerful tools to draw, illustrate, sketch, take notes and paint.
Paper is therefore an app for those like me, who love to draw and visualize their ideas, just-in-time and on-the-spot, either with your fingertips or with a dedicated stylus.
Final work can be easily shared on Facebook, twitter or posted directly to your Tumblr blog.
N.B.: The Essentials "engine" for Paper needs to be paid for and it costs $6.99. Additional tools like Color, Sketch, Write and Outline are sold separately at a price of $1.99 each.
Robin Good: Charteo is the first slide-by-slide online PowerPoint store offering high-quality, professional-looking slides that can be fully edited and customized.
Charteo offers more than 10,000 editable business slides, diagrams, charts and maps for Microsoft PowerPoint. Slides can be searched or browsed via a set of well organized categories.
In general, individual slides in Charteo cost apx. 3-4€, but for most you are also offered a large bundle of similar slides for a largely discounted price (e.g. 62 unique 3D slides designs for 49€).
Once you have picked and selected your preferred slides, Charteo packs them all in a .pptx file that sends to you as a link.
I have tested the service and I am impressed by the good quality and assortment of the designs available.
Robin Good: I am speechless. This is one of the best visual communication tools I have seen this year. Videoscribe.tv allows anyone to create effective doodle animations with the minimum of complexity and with really excellent results.
Videoscribe.tv has been available as an iOS app already for some time, but now a desktop version is also available.
I have purchased both the iOS and the desktop version of Videoscribe.tv and I have been blown out of my socks after I have seen with my eyes what this little app can do. Amazing.
There is a great library of vector art included, plus the software can scour the Internet searching for other vector images to use in your doodle animations. Not only. VideoScribe takes care automatically of crediting the original image authors/source.
A music soundtrack can be easily added by utilizing the licensed tracks available and you can also record your own voice-over.
Videoscribe.tv can export finalized doodles at different resolution levels from low quality to HD, and as JPG/PNG sequences or standard .MOV files. The final video can be saved locally, uploaded directly to YouTube or your Dropbox account or shared on Facebook.
Robin Good: Vengage is a new web app which allows anyone to created, edit and personalize professional-looking infographics by utilizing ready-made elements and an easy-to-use interface.
From the Carlispina blog: "The newest tool for creating interactive infographics online is Venngage from the Vizualize.Me team.
Building on the concepts that are at work in the Vizualize.Me infographic resume tool, Venngage allows users to create infographics on any topic with great simplicity.
Despite this simplicity, Venngage is also extremely versatile, offering 14 different infographic templates, each of which is highly customizable, including the ability to resize the overall infographic to meet your specific needs.
... a wide range of data types since it offers more than a dozen different types of charts, a host of symbols and shapes and the ability to add your own images.
Unlike many other infographic tools, Venngage also includes the ability to link to other web content directly in the infographic’s text."
Venngage offers the option to export a .png file, to share your final work on social media, to keep private, or to embed it on any website or blog.
"Unlike image-based infographics, Venngage's infographics are pure HTML elements and 100% search engine optimized."
Robin Good: Presto is a system which allows you to author dynamic presentations for iPads. Presentations are created on the Mac with Presto Builder and then exported to your iPad for final delivery.
Presto presentations are non-linear and you can swipe and connect to other slides in multiple ways.
The final content created with Presto can also be shared with your Twitter and Facebook contacts.
Robin Good: PDF Presenter is an open-source free cross-platform presentation software which allows you to edit and annotate existing content, import images and draw annotations .
With PDF Presenter you can type text next or over existing content, create multiple tabs with different whiteboards, and save your final work as a PDF file.
Robin Good: Now that SlideShare has significanty restricted its free offerings, limiting the size of presentations that can be uploaded for free, many presenters like me have started looking again for valid alternatives.
Among the many options available, one interesting and feature-rich presentation sharing service is Projeqt, which not only allows you to upload your existing presentations or PDFs, but it allows you to edit, extend and even create new presentations containing also dynamic elements (live tweets or blog feeds, interactive maps, audio notes or video clips).
"Projeqt is simple, intuitive and highly social, playing nice with other platforms by allowing you to mesh together text, image, video and feeds within the same Projeqt."
Key features include:
-> Stacks - build deeper inside a presentation by creating stacks in place of individual slides
-> Cross-platform - works on any modern browser, mobile device or tablet.
-> Upload PPT, PDF or batches of image files
-> Embed everywhere
-> Link together and connect as many presentations as you like.
Robin Good: SlidePresenter is a web service which allows you to upload the recorded video of your speech and synch with your PowerPoint presentation before publishing it online.
Key features include: - Clickable table of contents
Hi Thomas, you are right, but there are several good alternatives at more affordable prices. I am preparing a public list so that you can take direct advantage of it.
The problem with Knoodle is the poor navigation possibility. Not comparable with the SlidePresenter solution. But it really depends on what your goals are. SlidePresenter is an appropriate tool for corporations rather than for private use.
Robin Good: Symbol is free web app which allows you to easily pic any type of symbol character available in its extended and well organized collection and cut it and paste it into any document, web app, or social media channel.
To get content containing either thought or leadership enter:
To get content containing both thought and leadership enter:
To get content containing the expression thought leadership enter:
You can enter several keywords and you can refine them whenever you want. Our suggestion engine uses more signals but entering a few keywords here will rapidly give you great content to curate.
Your new post is loading...
add your insight...