We have written earlier about ways to dress up your PowerPoints
with Zurb’s Reel and Arctic Fox. There are several other players getting into the game with presentation apps and add-ons that go beyond just making your slides more attractive. New this week are tools from Zoho.com, and Trivantis’ Snap by Lectora.
Snap is a $99 Windows add-on app for PowerPoint that creates a Flash file. You can capture voice narration for each slide and add various other visual and Web content. You synchronize your slide animations and sound tracks with the tool and then can publish it online. It adds a ribbon to your menu commands as you see in the screen shot below.
Zoho has long had its own Show presentation software but last week announced v3 with more gee-gaws such as dynamic shapes, richer image editing, and better transitions and wizzy effects. But it isn’t all just eye candy; users can chat with their collaborators and instantly see all changes to a presentation, and embed and share presentations inside Web pages too. Show is free for personal use.
Brainshark also has plans to introduce a new tool here sometime next month, and we’ll add the specifics in the comments. The big elephant in this corner is Adobe’s Presenter software. There are also other more expensive software tools geared towards presentations. What is interesting about Zoho and Snap is how they are beginning to blur the boundaries between the presentation slide data and the SaaS service that hosts the presentation or delivers particular online content to it.
