I'm proud to announce the latest release of SlideSix is now live.  Here are the highlights:

Now Partnering With SlideMagnet

I'm very happy to announce a mutually beneficial partnership with a brand new service called SlideMagnet.  SlideMagnet is a new site dedicated to all things slides - from content and design suggestions to delivery hints and tips.  Here is a quick intro to their site in their own words:

SlideMagnet.com is all about slides. You will find that SlideMagnet is the best online resource to find anything you want about presentations and public speaking. The good news is that SlideMagnet is free for everyone. Most importantly, it's for you - the presenter.

The first step in this partnership was to pull together a page of presenter resources so that users of SlideSix now have a quick look into what is going on over at SlideMagnet.  Keep an eye on that page for useful content that will no doubt help you create effective and powerful presentations that you can post to SlideSix.  You'll hear more about this partnership soon, including some exciting collaborative efforts that will surely further both sites goals of ridding the world of boring presentations.

Import Your Presentations From Google Docs

Ok, so 'partnership' is a bit of an exaggeration, but the next exciting feature of this new release is the ability to import presentations from Google Docs.  In addition to uploading your presentations you can now simply provide your Docs credentials and you'll be presented with a list of all your presentations.  Choose the ones you want, click import, and you're done.  This new feature gives users a complete cloud solution for presentations.  Create your content on Google, import it into SlideSix, add multimedia and share with the world!  Note - we do not save your Google credentials.  They will be used one time to authenticate and retrieve your presentations.  Many thanks to my buddy Ray Camden for his ColdFusion wrapper for the Google Docs API.

Enhanced Presentation Viewer

The presentation viewer has gotten a small upgrade to include a quick way to flip between slides or advance directly to another slide later (or earlier) in the deck.  Inside the viewer you'll now notice a small icon in the bottom left corner of the slide (just above the menu button in the control bar).  Click this button and you'll see a 'coverflow' view of each slide.  To navigate you can click on any slide in the view to choose that slide, then click again to jump to that slide.  You may also use your left/right arrow keys and the enter key to navigate.  A third option (in fullscreen mode) is to use your mouse scroll wheel.  Here is a screenshot of what the slide navigator looks like in action:

Multimedia Presentation Indicator

This feature is small, but long overdue.  Now whenever you see a presentation thumbnail (on the front page, in search results, on a users page, etc), if the presentation has any sort of multimedia element (recorded audio or video, or external multimedia from Vimeo or YouTube) you'll see a small filmstrip icon in the bottom right corner of the thumbnail like so:

 Overall Design Refresh

The last major item in this new release is an overall cleanup of the site design.  We have an updated logo and the header area has been consolidated and cleaned up.  Some other overall changes to make the site look cleaner and differentiate text areas from graphics/presentations that will hopefully make the site a bit easier on the eyes.  Oh - and a new footer to consolidate important links into a single, concise spot.

Other Misc Changes

Here are the rest of the release notes for this new version:

• Added ability to choose different webcam in multimedia record window
• Added ability to delete narration
• Added Terms Of Service
• Added Privacy Policy
• Updated credits

Unfortunately I didn't get to a few other enhancements that were on the list for this version, but I'm sticking to a very tight release schedule for these updates to keep things moving forward. 

As always, feel free to drop a line of criticism, suggestions, or ideas.