Over the weekend I pushed a new version of the presentation viewer into production at SlideSix. The goal of this new viewer was to be much more user friendly, and I think it achieves that goal with a simplified approach of reducing the main player controls to three simple buttons and a new 'heads up' display that auto hides. Here's a screenshot of the viewer:

As previously stated, the viewer now sports a simple three button control system - play, next and previous. The main viewer menu, accessible by clicking the 'menu' button in the bottom left corner, has been slightly aesthetically modified but still contains the same functionality as before. The heads up menu was created to move some of the lesser used navigation type functionality out of the viewer and control bar, yet still within 'easy reach'. Within the heads up menu is a button to bring up the 'quick jump' slide menu, buttons to advance to the beginning or end of the presentation, a button to expose any slide notes (should they exist), and of course the slide counter. The heads up menu is initially visible when a presentation loads and will auto hide itself after a few seconds if no mouse activity is detected. To reveal the menu at any time, simply move your mouse near the top of the viewer. Finally - my favorite addition to the new viewer - and the reason for the 'remote control' image here in this post. The viewer is now responsive to your keyboard arrow keys perform some basic navigation. As you might expect, the left arrow key will go back one slide and the right arrow key will go forward one slide. In addition, the down arrow key will bring up the 'quick jump' slide menu. When this menu is visible you can use the same left/right arrow keystrokes to navigate slides. To jump to the new slide use the up arrow. My absolute favorite part about this enhancement is the fact that any standard laptop or PC remote control should be able to be used to navigate through your presentation by using the up/down/left/right keys on the remote control. Also, the play/pause buttons should work as expected, but only when not in full screen mode (due to security limitations within the Flash player itself that restrict keystrokes in full screen mode). Now you can use SlideSix to present your multimedia presentations at school or your next conference! The keyboard shortcuts require that the presentation viewer itself has focus. It usually does, but if you notice the viewer is not responding to your key presses just click your mouse anywhere on a slide. Full screen mode should not be a problem - the viewer should always be in focus. For this reason, full screen is recommended when using keyboard shortcuts or a remote control. Since I was not able to comprehensively test this new feature in multiple environments, please let me know if you find that a remote control is not working as expected. Update: I forgot to include this quick YouTube demo on the new viewer. This is going to be a part of a comprehensive 'how-to' presentation on SlideSix soon, but I thought I'd throw it in here to show how it works: