SlideSix.com - Retooled and Relaunched
Over the last few weeks since CFUnited I've been in the labs refactoring, re-tooling and reworking SlideSix.com based on some conversations and feedback from a few of my friends as well as some general research on some existing presentation sharing communities. The result of that work is now live and I'm really excited about how things turned out. Here are the highlights:
Conversion engine replaced
First and foremost, if your presentation does not look perfect when you convert it then you're obviously not going to want to upload and share it with the world. To that end the conversion engine has been completely switched to utilize a different API. The new engine has yet to fail a single import test in my local testing.
Additional file formats
Another benefit of switching the conversion engine was support for additional file formats. SlideSix now supports:PPTX (PowerPoint 2007), PPT (PowerPoint 97/2003/XP), ODP (OpenOffice Impress) and SXI (OpenOffice 1.0). I very much would like to support Keynote upload directly, but my extensive research has yet to find an existing conversion tool. I'm considering support for MOV (Quicktime) import since Keynote can easily be exported to that format with little quality loss. Basically each frame of the MOV would become a slide on SlideSix. Any Mac users have thoughts on this? I'm also considering adding support for PDF. Thoughts?
No more editing slides
The 'Slide Editing' feature is now gone. I was never happy with using FCKEditor for this, and to be honest the only reason I ever even offered editing was because the previous conversion engine did not do a perfect import. Now that the import is near perfect I didn't see the need to leave the slide editor in place. There are other tools for presentation creation and editing, and most of them do a better job then what I offered. Removing the slide editor gave me the ability to greatly simplify the process for adding media (audio/video) to slides. Watch the 'Adding Media' demo to see how easy it is.
Private presentations
Many people commented that they would like the ability to create a private presentation. You can now password protect your presentation which keeps it from being displayed in search results. You can share your password with whomever you would like to view your preso.
UI Enhancements
Overall there were some layout tweaks that should lead to a better user experience. Much of the Ajax functionality was switched to utilize jQuery including the addition of an Ajax 5 star rating system for presentations. There were also links added to each presentation to allow for immediate copy/paste of embed code as well as offering a 'Share' feature so that users can send a note to their friends about a given presentation.
Friend invite
I blogged a few weeks back about the need for an open source ColdFusion contact import system (I promise a followup post on that soon). Since one didn't exist I decided to take advantage of an existing web service to perform this functionality. The service lets you import from GMail, AOL, Hotmail or Yahoo and invite your friends to join SlideSix.com.
That's about it for the changes. If you have checked out SlideSix already and were a bit disappointed I strongly urge you to give it another shot. If you haven't checked it out yet, what are you waiting for? It's simple, easy, powerful and fun (just like ColdFusion)!
Here are a few other links you might find helpful:
RSS
I think PDF support is a good idea, I personally like it when presentations are made available as PDFs. So few people use PPT animation in a way that truly enhances the presentation, most of the time I'd just as soon have it in a universal, compressed format. Also many people may not realize you can add some presentation style enhancements with PDFs, such as transitions and full screen view.
Do you have any preso's in PDF format that you could send me to try out? (todd at cfsilence dot com).
@Ray -
I plan another blog post to go into that. I wanted to keep this post a little less technical since it was so big.
that's what *she* said!
booyah!
(sorry, we now return you to your regularly scheduled comments)