Empressr Rebuilds Presentation Tool in Flex
Mark Hendrickson
13 comments »
It’s been over a year since we last covered online presentation tool Empressr. Tonight the company releases version 3 of its product, which has been rebuilt completely in Flex.
Much of the improvements in this third version are structural, so you might not see much on the surface. Among the noticeable improvements is a new film strip for viewing the slides in a presentation. Click on the middle button at the bottom of the player and you’ll see thumbnail previews of these slides. The editing tool also has a new interface and drag-n-drop functionality for images, movies, and flash files.
Empressr sports an impressively functional presentation tool accessible entirely through the web browser. The point is basically to bring PowerPoint online so you can easily share and collaborate on presentations.
Currently, Empressr prides itself in the ability to bring content into your slides from around the web. Movies and photos don’t need to be hosted by Empressr to be embedded in your presentations; you can pull them from Flickr, YouTube, etc. Completed presentations can also be embedded and published elsewhere on the web (such as in the bottom of this blog post). The editor provides professional snap-to-grid functionality and the ability to make presentations of varying dimensions, so presentations can potentially fitted to any aspect ratio necessary for page embedding.
Not yet available is the ability for groups to simultaneously work on a single presentation, although the company says it will debut this functionality (perhaps for premium members only) before too long. Empressr has also not yet made the leap back offline but the company will design an offline viewer in AIR for the first quarter of next year and an offline editor perhaps in the second quarter.
Nice product. Consider having a message that say’s loading or something, I thought it was broken.
Empressive…
maybe Google will by them….maybe
I guess it’s better than the old version but still pretty rough interface.
Have anyone seen SlideRocket? Looks pretty sweet from the website - http://www.sliderocket.com
what are ppl thinking about the online office suits? do they think ppl will open their doc/ xml everywhere else?
the thing is, ppl are actually taking their laptops or mobile machine everywhere. or ppl just take their USB with their files, send their files to an online email, repository.
I still can’t seem to see a practice use of such application that you put ur files only and spend 5 mins to log in and open ur file.
@ Joe B. (#3)
Google already bought Tonic Systems as well as Zenter so no, they will not be buying Empressr.
@ Stan Oleynick
That was a joke
@ ki
It may take time to make online office suits viable….as it took time to make internet viable!
I still prefer a desktop version!
Googles presentation software is terrible. I messed around with it a while back. Aside from it being a good mesh with their current AJAX based document suite I think a flex based solution like this make for a better experience all around. I see that empressr has sort of the KeyNote thing happening, i can’t see someone making those transitions happen successfully in ajax. I could definitely see some great possiblities.
nice software. the transitions seem a bit borked (safari?) but the slides load really fast and that’s the priority when flipping through embedded presentations, that are usually in the middle of some other content on a page.
I tried the software but it’s very buggy.
I have the debug player installed and there are lots of errors raising and functionality that doesn’t work.
This is not even a beta…
Sorry folks, great idea, but not ready for production!
Fritz
Only PowerPoint is worth a hoot baby!