Gabe Anderson (pictured to the left) takes care of support and community initiatives at Articulate, a provider of rich media products used for e-learning.
In this conversation, Gabe discusses Articulate Quizmaker, how you can create quizzes, and how Quizmaker integrates with Articulate's other products.
Geetesh: Tell us more about Articulate Quizmaker -- and how it makes it easy to create quizzes fast.
Gabe: Articulate Quizmaker 2.0 is a comprehensive yet easy-to-use quiz creator for making highly customized Flash-based quizzes, assessments and surveys without the need for difficult programming. It provides a form-based interface with one-click publishing to Flash so that anyone who can use PowerPoint can create attractive, Flash-based quizzes in no time -- no Flash development experience required. There are 21 different graded and survey question types, which can be published to a stand-alone quiz or survey for use in your own Learning Management System or Articulate Online -- with full tracking and reporting capabilities.
Geetesh: How does Articulate Quizmaker integrate with other Articulate programs.
Gabe: Quizmaker publishes seamlessly to Articulate Presenter so that you can embed your quizzes and surveys directly in your Presenter-powered courses. You can even choose to send the embedded quiz results directly to your own Learning Management System or Articulate Online. Publishing from Quizmaker to Articulate Online is simple - just plug in your account details once, then publish to your account in just one click.
You can see a demo of how easy it is to publish content from Quizmaker to Articulate Online in the tutorials section of our site. Look for the demo called Publishing from Quizmaker.
There are many advantages in converting a PowerPoint presentation into a Flash SWF movie since they tend to be smaller in size, cannot be edited, and can easily be viewed in almost any operating system or computer these days. And with dozens of PowerPoint-Flash converting applications available, it's easy to be spoilt for choices.
And with so many choices, every such application has to either do things better than others or add more capabilities. WildPresenter, the product we are reviewing tries to do both -- and in this review, we will explore if it succeeds or not.
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 Wildform Online, their new online service that lets you host surveys and quizzes.
Geetesh: Tell us more about Wildform Online, and how it can help users do simple tasks?
Colby: With Wildform Online people can upload their e-learning quizzes, tests, surveys and presentations to the web and track viewership and score results without the expense and labor typically associated with using an LMS (Learning Management System). For as low as $19.99 a month, we host and track how their employees, students, customers and prospects interact with their projects.
For example, if a teacher creates a quiz, she can post it online, invite her students to take the quiz, track the test scores of her students, and if she wants, send them their results. She can choose to publish her quiz for a general audience or restrict it to just her students. Wildform Online also creates detailed reports for her - she can see how many people viewed her quiz, who took it and how they did. Wildform Online is also a great way to conduct surveys and polls - just upload your survey, invite people to take it and view the results. It's also an effective way to host and track the results of interactive presentations and online courses.
Geetesh: How does Wildform Online integrate with other Wildform products?
Colby: Wildform Online works fantastically with our product WildPresenter Pro, which lets you create multimedia presentations, quizzes, tests, surveys, and product demos, as well as converting PowerPoint to Flash, and recording onscreen activity . It is because of WildPresenter's quiz and survey creation capabilities that we built Wildform Online. Many of our customers created quizzes and surveys and then wanted to know how to upload them to the web and track the results from people taking them. What they were asking for typically requires an expensive and complex LMS (Learning Management System) that frequently costs in the tens of thousands of dollars. We offer this service to our customers for only $19.99 a month.
It's hard to believe now, but there used to be a time when PowerPoint to Flash converters were so expensive, and few are far in between. Some of those products were in fact hosted on the servers of the program vendors, and you had to use your browser to upload and download content all the time.
Nowadays, this capability is available in products that range from free to a hundred dollars whereabouts. And these products work on your desktop, not on some remote server.
FlashPoint is one such application -- and in this review I am going to see how the application performs using our new PowerPoint to Flash benchmark presentation.
Rhys Jeremiah has been working in IT after graduating from Bristol University with a degree in mathematics. He started writing database applications for a large insurance company and quickly moved into web development, the largest site for a major international motor manufacturer. Although now teaching mathematics, he still manages some IT work. He currently lives in Cardiff, Wales with Sarah, his wife, and their children Lloyd and Carys.
Geetesh: Tell us more about your Extract Flash product, and what inspired you to create this.
Rhys: As is often common, the reason for creating the Extract Flash product was to solve a problem that could have easily been avoided. The company I was working for at the time was a major client of a marketing firm here in the UK. Last thing on a Friday afternoon, we were asked to update a flash file on a website and that the replacement file would be winging its way to us via email very soon. None of us in the office were quite prepared for the fact that the file had been placed into a PowerPoint presentation. It seemed that the last thing the marketing company did before the weekend was to send that file as numerous phone calls to get the original file failed. So we had a problem.
I noticed that it was possible to drag and drop the embedded Flash object between Office products and even drop it onto the desktop as a scrap file (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/138275). So I reasoned that the file must contain the Flash file that we were searching for. Hence it was worth digging a bit deeper. On opening the scrap file in a binary editor, I was able to locate the header block of the SWF file and without too much effort it was the possible to pull the binary data out and write it back to disk. The reason I wrote an application to do this is that I enjoy the challenge of trying something new, and also providing a useful tool to the community. In theory the scrap approach would work for any type of embedded object so long as the header block could be read and processed. With a small amount of knowledge it would be possible to change the file to search a binary file for any header block and extract the embedded data. From memory I think that SWF files are held in PowerPoint files without encryption so you don't necessarily need to mess about with the scrap file.
Geetesh: Many people believe that their embedded Flash content in a PowerPoint slide is secure -- so this does prove them wrong. How important is it for them to be aware of this, and would the scrap approach also work with any other embedded content in Microsoft Office documents.
Rhys: From my experience many people think that all embedded files in Office documents are secure. I can't count how many times someone has sent me a Word document containing loads of images. I've never really considered the people actually use this method to protect their files. It's certainly naive to approach security in this fashion. Personally I think that the only way to secure your sensitive data is not to give it away, as soon as you release any information you lose the ability to control the distribution. If you really want to secure your embedded content don't embed it.
FlashSpring Pro is a PowerPoint add-in which allows you to converts your PowerPoint presentations into Flash SWF movies with all the slide transitions, custom animations, audio and video clips, and inserted Flash SWF files intact.
Wildform announced an upgrade to their WildPresenter product that adds several new features:
A slide show wizard that easily create slideshows with images and SWF files. Just select your files and WildPresenter will take care of the rest.
Improved text rendering that includes small font enhancement features as well as improved text alignment.
New export dialogue --every time you export your files, WildPresenter tells you which files you exported, where they are located and which files you need in order to publish your project.
Improved export of slides that exports all the slides in your project individually at one time.
Improve slide navigation player that changes the name of the slide navigation player XML and thumbs folder.
authorPOINT Lite, a free PowerPoint to Flash Converter has been released by authorGEN, a Raleigh, NC based company that creates e-learning and presentation software. This presentation creation tool is a small download, and works on your desktop to create compact Flash files from your PowerPoints. The tool can also perform batch conversion of multiple .PPS and .PPT files.
authorPOINT Lite retains most PowerPoint effects including animations and sounds without any loss in presentation quality in the Flash (.SWF) output. Flash presentations have a number of advantages over PowerPoint format as Flash files are lighter, more secure, multiple browser and operating system compatible.
I love using SlideShare because it's a one-click process to upload and share my PowerPoints. However, SlideShare did lack the audio streams that make YouTube and iFilm so popular. And so people want to create YouTube movies from their PowerPoints. Not any more -- since SlideShare has added a cool new feature called SlideCasting.
SlideCasting is cool not just because it adds an audio stream to SlideShare's online presentations but because it does this in such a well implemented process:
First, the presentation upload and the audio feature are completely different -- so the ease of use remains for those who just want to upload a presentation without audio.
You can use any audio stream that has a URL -- for example an MP3 uploaded to your own site, or a podcast.
Then you mashup the uploaded presentation and audio together. You can do this (and sync the slide timings as well) through an intuitive interface that includes a view of the slides and the waveform of the linked audio stream.
And you can add audio to any of your uploads on SlideShare -- even the ones that were done before SlideShare added the SlideCast feature.
SWiSHzone creates a well known range of Flash output programs, and when they released their PowerPoint add-in that could create Flash output from a presentation, I really wanted to take a look at the product. Their PowerPoint add-in product is called SWiSH Presenter.
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 WildPresenter, their Flash authoring product that integrates so well with PowerPoint content.
Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself, Wildform, and WildPresenter.
Colby: I'm the president and co-founder of Wildform and one of my main responsibilities is to oversee the marketing at Wildform. I have a liberal arts background. I grew up studying ballet very seriously, got a BA in Classics from Barnard and a masters in religion from Harvard. I've spent many years writing and in theatre, exploring the intersection of art and technology. An installation project I was working on led me to learn advanced animation programs (Alias and Wavefront) and from there I immersed myself in technology. Before starting Wildform in 1999, I worked at www.nytimes.com and before that I was in charge of marketing for a document imaging company. I have tried to retain my sense of what it is like for someone to use our products who is not enamored with technology and views it as a tool. We have always tried to make our products as easy and fun to use as possible. We have also created products that we ourselves would have wanted to use.
In many ways, WildPresenter is the synthesis of all of the technology we have developed so far. It contains a media importer that converts all images, audio and video to Flash. The origin of this technology was our original Flash video converter called Flix, which we sold to ON2. WildPresenter also has a text effects tool, which is basically our standalone product, WildFX. The timeline in WildPresenter and the ability to combine any kind of SWF file together had its origins in a previous product called Linx. WildPresenter though is much more powerful than Linx because it now contains hundreds of built in shapes, objects, flowcharts, animations, slide transitions and a whole set of drawing tools, so that you can now build entire Flash web sites with the program. In addition to being a media converter, a text effects generator, and basic Flash site builder, WildPresenter contains an entire screen recording program, like Camtasia, a quiz creator, and last but not least for your readers, a PowerPoint to Flash converter, which creates very accurate conversions with the smallest possible file size.
So, really WildPresenter is like having six major programs in one. There is nothing like it on the market. It is exactly the program that I fantasized about having when I was producing for the web at the New York Times Digital -- an easy to use multimedia program that would let me quickly combine video, audio, images, and text, so that I could create something original and compelling and post it rapidly to the web, concentrate on producing great content and not get bogged down in struggling with the software.
Geetesh: What are the new PowerPoint specific features in WildPresenter 3.3 -- and can you give us case studies of end users who create outputs from their PowerPoint presentations with WildPresenter.
Colby: WildPresenter has been a powerful PowerPoint to Flash converter for awhile, generating accurate conversions and small file sizes. What's new in version 3.3 is that we have added a "Combine Your PowerPoint and Video" wizard. We added this because we have many customers who like to combine their PowerPoint files with video and convert their projects to web-friendly Flash. The wizard streamlines the process for them. They can now execute what is technologically a very complex process in three easy steps –- select a PowerPoint, select a video and click “Next”. Once they have completed the wizard, they can change the layout and design of their project if they like. WildPresenter also comes with other wizards and we will continue to add more based on what our customers tell us they most want. Wildform has a lot of fans and we like to honor them. You can read testimonials from our customers and we feature customer examples in the Customer Gallery section of our blog.
WildPresenter 3.3 has a great new feature that allows you to import a PowerPoint presentation and a video clip within three clicks -- and you don't have to do anything else. Just wait for the program to create an output that looks similar to the screenshot you can see in Figure 1:
Figure 1: A presentation and a movie side-by-side in one output
Wildform, the creators of WildPresenter have also put up a walkthrough of the entire process on their site. Look here...
Helius Inc. announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire PointeCast Corp., a leading global provider of rapid-communication and online training solutions. PointeCast's Publisher product allows users to enhance Microsoft PowerPoint presentations with real time quizzes, surveys, response tracking and other multimedia features and then instantly convert them into the Adobe Flash format for easy integration. PointeCast's robust learning management system (LMS) enables customers to administer and track e-learning and training courses.
authorSTREAM is a new, content sharing social media networking site open to everyone to upload, share and view PowerPoint presentations. This free offering comes from authorGEN Technologies, who create authorPOINT, a multimedia e-learning presentation creator, which installs in PowerPoint and outputs to Flash.
PowerPoint files, when uploaded to authorSTREAM, get converted to Flash and can be accessed by anyone on the website; a unique code and URL is generated for every presentation to enable users to embed or share their presentation with anyone on their own blog or website. More info on the authorSTREAM site...
authorGEN announced the release of authorPOINT 3.8 with several new features for rapid e-learning authoring.
authorPOINT is a rapid e-learning presentation creation tool, which installs within PowerPoint as a toolbar and captures PowerPoint presentations when an instructor is presenting. It comes with the option to embed presenters' video through a web cam as they present, or integrate video and audio as required.
Presentations created with authorPOINT can be saved in Flash or Windows Media formats. Further, the Flash file can be uploaded to a dedicated server on authorSTREAM which provides the presenter with a unique URL to deliver streaming Flash presentations.
Yury Uskov is Technical Director at CPS Labs, a software development company based out of Yoshkar-Ola, Russia. Yury has a Masters degree in Software Engineering and since 2001, he has been working in rich media industry as the co-founder of CPS Labs Ltd. CPS Labs has launched several Flash technology projects including FlashSpring, a PowerPoint to Flash converter that ships as an add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint.
Geetesh: Tell us more about the new FlashSpring 2, and how it is different from other similar products.
Yury: If you like to know more about the originality of FlashSpring 2.0, I can point out several major strong advantages of our product:
Single Flash File: We create one solid Flash file from one PowerPoint PPT presentation. We embed in this file all internal and external presentation content, including Flash movies and videos, additional audio tracks, etc. The presenter can enrich his Flash presentation with an attractive player and we also can embed this player in the final Flash movie. This contained Flash movie can be easily deployed on the web, or sent through email -- and will be displayed directly in your message content.
Most of the other PowerPoint to Flash convertors actually cannot do this and produce some mixture of HTML and Flash files which represents the original PPT after conversion. It is possible to put this presentation on the web, but if you like to send such presentation via email, it can be delivered only as an archive.
Quality of Flash content: FlashSpring carefully retains the geometry and placing of PowerPoint shapes, keeping them in vector format after conversion to Flash. We have tested a lot of competitors and most of them convert shapes to raster and only the text objects are vector. Also most of them has problems with complex text objects, bullets, etc.
Speed: I can definitely say that according to the number of supported PowerPoint features, FlashSpring 2 is the fastest PowerPoint to Flash converter. It also produces the most compact Flash output (because we keep most of original PowerPoint content in vector).
Geetesh: How does FlashSpring aid in the distribution of PowerPoint content?
Yury: Being converted to Flash, your PowerPoint presentation becomes more portable and distribution friendly, because almost anybody can play Flash content on most of platforms in most of browsers.
Additionally FlashSpring is enhanced with deployment options, and can help you to put your Flash presentation on your web site or send via email as easily as possible.
Capturing on screen activity to create a movie is so much easier these days with more powerful computers and software -- and it is also a more helpful way of explaining how a task can be done. Such a concept works great if you want to create tutorial movies, and TechSmith's Camtasia Studio is most certainly among the best products for this type of work.
Blue Pacific Software announced a completely free version of Rich Chart Live, their online charting program that lets you create and share your charts almost anywhere. You can also copy and paste some HTML code from within the online program to insert the charts in blogs and websites. The free version does place a small Rich Chart Live logo on the bottom-right corner of each generated chart.
Manuel Fernandes from Blue Pacific adds that "this new release of Rich Chart Live was specially designed for bloggers: it is very easy to embed a Rich Chart in any blog, not to mention that it is free. Posting a Rich Chart in a blog or website is as easy as copy & pasting HTML".
The paid version of Rich Chart Live is still available -- and there's a significant price reduction on the subscription charge for that service.
Yury Uskov is Technical Director at 
