Check Out The New SlideSix

I'm happy to announce that the new and improved SlideSix is now live. This new look and feel is a complete overhaul compared to the original design of the site. The new design uses a lot of gray, blue and black in order to make the site more closely resemble the Flex pieces that were already in place. There are also a lot of rounded corners to take the edge off of the deep colors so they hopefully don't overwhelm. Thanks to some feedback there is also a shiny new logo. Here's the new home page:

More after the jump:

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SlideSix Labs Launches With Presentation Analytics and Collaborate

As part of our neverending quest to become the premier presentation sharing community on the web I am thrilled to finally introduce SlideSix Labs. As you've probably guessed, SlideSix Labs is a place where new bleeding edge features, technologies and enhancements will be introduced to our users for testing before the features are rolled out to all of our members. The first two features to launch in labs are sure to be well received by users who are serious about creating impressive presentations on the web - Presentation Analytics and Collaborate.

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Why Presenters Should Use SlideSix

We are in the midst of 'conference season' where many folks within the Adobe Developer Communities (ColdFusion, Flex, AIR, etc) are attending any of a number of amazing events to learn about our favorite technologies. I specifically mention Adobe technologies because the majority of my audience here at my blog use those technologies on a daily basis, but this post certainly applies to anyone who has a need to present material in front of an audience.

So as many of my readers know, I run a presentation sharing community called SlideSix. I often encourage friends and acquaintences to post their slides to SlideSix. Many of them actually do, albeit sometimes reluctantly. By far, the most common complaint I hear from folks is some variation of "my slides really aren't that helpful without my presentation."

My response to that statement may surprise you - I completely agree. Which is why SlideSix is much more then slide sharing. There are other sites for that, and they seem to be pretty happy in letting folks post slides that may be meaningless outside of the context of the material that was actually presented. SlideSix is about presentation sharing. Once you've uploaded your slides you can easily record audio or video narration for your slides within our management console. Recorded narration can take a simple slide deck and give it meaning. It can put context to your bullet points and images and let you tell the story behind your message. Want to show a demo of something? Record it with any standard screencasting software, upload it to YouTube or Vimeo then search for it in SlideSix and attach it right to your slide. Sure, it may take a little time to put together a proper web based multimedia presentation, but the payoff is an impressive product that you can embed on your site so people who may not have had a chance to see your presentation in person can have a very similar experience to those who were lucky enough to see it live.

SlideSix is also the perfect tool to practice your presentation. How many times have you stood in front of a mirror or your dog and practiced giving your presentation? Did you really benefit from doing that? Wouldn't it be much better to actually record (and re-record) your material so that you could actually view it back and share with others for feedback?

I encourage presenters to take a look at SlideSix for your presentation needs. You'll be happy you did, and so will your audience.

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A Tale Of Two API's

SlideSix, like many other social networks these days, has long offered the ability to import a contact list from your favorite webmail client for the purpose of sending a quick invitation to your friends to join. Some people aren't a fan of such services, but as my favorite TV personality likes to say - "that's another show".

In all reality, it's quite a handy feature to have - and a good way to get some viral marketing out of your users that are really excited about your product. Make it dead simple for them to tell a lot of friends about your service and you just might find word spreading quickly.

So as I stated above, we've offered this service for quite some time now. But recently I took notice that despite the fact that a lot of users were actually hitting the page, no invites were being sent. I found it a bit curious so I logged in and ran a quick test which yielded zero contacts in my Gmail account (of which I knew there were hundreds). My first reaction was that I had inadvertently introduced a bug into my code but a quick check confirmed that I hadn't made any changes. My next step was to head off to the support site for the service that I had been using to abstract the contact list import - a service called Rapleaf. I did some quick searching around there site, but I couldn't even find the API documentation for their address book API. I eventually found the documentation which contained the following note at the top of the page:

NOTE: Since Rapleaf is now focusing on our core set of APIs, we are no longer offering support for the Address Book API

I should state that I don't have a problem with a company changing gears and focusing on a different, most likely more profitable part of their business. It happens every day and it only makes sense to focus on elements that bring in the most bang for the buck. What I do have a problem with is the fact that I had to search, pretty hard I might add, for the fact that the API was no longer supported. Since I had taken the time to actually sign up for an API key I think it would have been decent of them to send a quick email out to developers letting them know that they were no longer supporting it. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they did send a message but I somehow overlooked it or it got caught by a rogue spam filter.

Unfortunately at this point I was left high and dry without a service to use to import contacts. I could have taken the time to build my own service, but since my existing service was not functioning I didn't have the luxury of time on my side. So off I went to do some searching for a new alternative. I quickly found a paid option from a company called Octazen Solutions. They offer a huge set of supported webmail clients and sell a library for most popular programming languages. After a bit of research I decided to go with their package.

I should note that although they do offer their library in ColdFusion (my language of first choice) I chose to go with the Java library instead. Why? First off they don't show any ColdFusion samples on their site so I had no idea what they're offering (custom tag? CFC?). Secondly, I found it kinda silly that the ColdFusion option was priced at $200 and the Java option was priced at $88. Why is that silly? Well, since ColdFusion runs on Java I could easily save myself more then a hundred bucks by purchasing the Java library and creating the Java object directly within ColdFusion. Long story short I went with the Java library, and thanks to Mark Mandel's JavaLoader I got the package up and running in about 2 lines of code. Seriously.

Which returned a nice array of contacts like such:

Thankfully I have the feature back up and running, and now better then ever since I can offer support for way more clients than I was before. Octazen was pretty quick to ship my license and even quicker to respond to a licensing question I posed to them. If you're looking for a contact importing solution I'd recommend taking a look at their product. You can also try it out on SlideSix (must be logged in).

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SlideSix Gets A New Viewer - Adds Remote Control Support

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:

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Why Should You Attend CFUnited 2009?

I put together the following presentation with the blessing of Liz and Nafisa to combine a lot of their hard work into a single resource that answers the question:

Why should I attend CFUnited 2009?

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SlideSix Improves Search With Seeker

I pushed my weekly SlideSix build into production on Saturday night which included a number of miscelaneous bug fixes for the management console and a minor enhancement to the presentation viewer that gives users the ability to control the advance speed via a slider control in the viewer menu. But the big addition for the week came in the form of a powerful search engine called Lucene. User searches are drastically more accurate - and quicker too - thanks to the open source engine.

I chose to use Lucene over the built in ColdFusion Verity searching for a few reasons. First and most importantly I wanted to make sure whatever option I chose was scalable. Verity has a limit on how large collections can be (depending on your ColdFusion license) and I didn't want to have to worry about that limit at any point in the future. I also wanted something that was easy to implement. In the case of Lucene, implementation was extremely simple thanks to - yep, you guessed it - a project called Seeker by the King of ColdFusion open source Ray Camden. I should mention that his birthday is Wednesday and he has a wishlist.

As always, feedback is welcome. Please try out the new search and let me know what you think.

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Quick Upload/Import Added To SlideSix

Over the weekend I quietly implemented a new feature at SlideSix. The management console is a great way to have full control over your presentations, profile and groups, but I realized that sometimes users just want to quickly upload or import a presentation. To that end I've added a new page to allow you to do just that. Now when you login to SlideSix you'll see a new link at the top of the page:

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SlideSix Partners with SlideMagnet And Google

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

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SlideSix Featured On Mashable

Last night Mashable featured SlideSix as part of their 'Spark of Genius' series.

I can't begin to describe how awesome getting coverage like this is. Huge thanks to Jennifer for the post.

Stay tuned for some really cool new features and a really exciting announcement coming real soon.

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