FlashSpring Pro 2
Reviewed: Geetesh Bajaj
Date Created: March 3rd 2007
Last Updated: February 25th 2009
Introduction
About FlashSpring Pro
New Features
The Player Feature
Pricing and Support
Conclusion
Introduction
This is not the first time that I am reviewing FlashSpring Pro -- so rather than do a whole, new review, I'll explore the new features in FlashSpring Pro 2.0.
FlashSpring Pro is a PowerPoint add-in which allows you to convert PowerPoint presentations into Flash SWF movies with all the custom animation, slide transitions, audio and video clips intact.
Here's a link to my earlier review on FlashSpring Pro...
About FlashSpring Pro
FlashSpring Pro is from CPS labs, a software development company based out of Yoshkar-Ola, Russia.
My contact at FlashSpring for this review was Sergey Sidukov, thank you Sergey.
Back
New Features
The new and improved features in FlashSpring Pro 2 include:
- Single Flash File compatible with different browsers.
- Customized Player
- Quality of Flash content that
retains any linked multimedia content.
- Speed of conversion to Flash that can also cope up with large PowerPoint presentations.
Yury Uskov of CPS Labs explains some of these features in more detail in this exclusive Indezine conversation -- read here...
The Player Feature
Let me go into more detail about the Player. While converting a PowerPoint presentation to a Flash SWF movie, you can opt to package this output within a Player that aids slide navigation, and also allows viewers to see the presentation online, while it’s still being downloaded.
You can change the colors of this Player:
- Open PowerPoint, where you will find FlashSpring Pro 2 toolbar
as shown in Figure 1 -- if you don't find it there
choose View | Toolbars | FlashSpring Pro.
Figure1: FlashSpring Pro 2 toolbar
- Open any presentation, or create a new presentation. When done, save
the presentation, and click the Publish option within
the FlashSpring toolbar (refer to Figure 1 above).
- This opens the Publish To Flash window as shown in Figure
2.
Figure 2 : Publish
Activate the Add Player checkbox.
- To customize the Player, click the Customize button (refer to Figure
2 above) -- this brings up the Customize Player window (see Figure
3 below).
Figure 3 : Customize Player
Change the colors of the Player window as required by dragging the Hue, Saturation, and Lightness sliders, and click OK to apply the changes.
- This gets you back to the Publish to Flash window -- click the Publish button to export the presentation to Flash SWF movie.
Pricing and Support
FlashSpring Pro 2 costs $199.00 for a single-user license. Multiple user licenses are available.
Email support is by e-mail, telephone, fax and a small online FAQ.
Conclusion
FlashSpring Pro is a viable option in the growing number of PowerPoint to Flash converters available. The pricing is good, and it's particularly attractive to the non-enterprise users who don't need options like quizzing and web-conferencing built-in.
