Freepath is a great, new addition to my PowerPoint software collection. So why did I use the term "PowerPoint software collection"? That's because many users just call Freepath a great PowerPoint alternative! That's funny since Freepath has no way to create an outline, or print handouts! So without further distracting you about alternatives, let me tell you more about Freepath.
Freepath is a playlist program with a refreshingly, different approach:
Freepath plays your PowerPoint presentations one after the other, or even some slides from each of the presentations in your playlist. All your PowerPoint shortcuts work as does your presentation remote since Freepath essentially uses PowerPoint itself to play the PowerPoint presentation. So no surprises there!
If you want to add a Flash animation or a QuickTime movie between slides 3 and 4, you can just insert them in your playlist! Activate the playlist and Freepath plays the Flash and QuickTime so seamlessly that your audience might believe that those elements played in PowerPoint! You can also control the videos in ways you could never imagine using PowerPoint - and of course, PowerPoint has almost no QuickTime support!
If you want to add live Word and Excel content to your presentation, just put them inside the Freepath playlist - these will open seamlessly again and you can also edit them while presenting. You can also use plain text files the same way.
Insert PDFs and live web pages (as long as you are online) in your playlist. You can also navigate between the pages in a PDF document.
Play sound in your playlist - even DRM protected music that you bought from the iTunes store - you can actually drag them from iTunes to Freepath. And when a video with sound plays, you can continue to play another sound to provide realtime mixing although you can always turn off the sound files by pressing the "s" key on the keyboard.
That's what I learned from my initial half-an-hour with Freepath - I'm in touch with Lou Douros, President of Grass Roots Software, who make Freepath to do a full review soon on Indezine.com - meanwhile, you can download a free trial from their site...2 comments
Freepath doesn't run the PowerPoint presentations -- it passes control to PowerPoint itself. If PowerPoint can show those transitions and animations, then Freepath can.
