Newsletters » News at 14/07/2008

Contents

• Hello
• How can you help?
• New features
• Coming soon...
• Known issues

Dear Beta Tester,

you are receiving this email because you signed up for Zuiprezi beta test. We will send out infrequent updates about the project, at larger releases of new features. Please let us know if you don't want to receive these.

How can you help?

• If you did something nice, please share it at http://test.zuiprezi.com/forum/showyour
• Also please report bugs in the forum.
• We'll be ready to receive more testers soon again, so please spread the word if you like zuiprezi.
• And please don't forget, if you need to have a very professional presentation, with animations or 3d charts, we have a team that can do this as a service for you. We can also create a style to match your company's identity. We are using this income to support the core development, so its really an investment for you, not just an expense.

New Features

Presentation manager

Some of our early bird testers had to ask us for every new presentation file they needed. Now you have a proper management page where you can create, delete, publish, download and access all your presentations. (You can log in to your account at the bottom of the try page: http://test.zuiprezi.com/try/ )

New text editor

Now you can easily align your text, create bulleted lists and adjust the width of the boxes, but why bother with hundreds of formatting options? The toolbar of the new text editor will adapt to the text just typed in. Try it out and share your experience.

New path editor

You can easily create and edit predefined presentation paths. Just go to record / path, and start clicking on the objects in the order you want to present them. You can edit these path steps or add new steps in between by simply dragging the endpoints.

Autosave

Now your presentation is saved automatically every time you change it, so hopefully you won't loose anything by accidentally hitting the browser's back button.

Download presentations for offline showing

Having to worry about Internet access while giving an important presentation can be a show-stopper. So we bring you the offline mode, you can show your presentations from your computer. This feature is coming in a couple of days. (Note: on some older computers the offline presentations have some issues, please do check in time if it works for you or not. And please keep in mind that to be able the edit them you'll still need to be online)

Copy Paste

Copy Paste Cut Undo Redo as you like CTRL_C as copy, CTRL_V as paste, CTRL_X as cut, CTRL_Z as undo, CTRL_Y as redo

Grid and snap

Now zui shows a grid while you are in place mode, to help you to distinguish between the different modes we have. Also, if you hold down shift while moving, rotating an object, or drawing an arrow, zui snaps to a global grid, making it easy to create nice aligned maps. Talking about shift: if an object is selected, you can use the arrow keys to move it slowly to do some precise adjustments. If you do the same while holding shift down, the steps are larger so you can move things faster.

PDF

Now you can upload PDF files into your maps. This is especially useful as you can embed your powerpoints, excel sheets, or conference papers this way. Just print them as pdf (or save as pdf from openoffice) and upload into zui. Zui places your multi page documents in a nice grid. (Please don't upload larger than 20 pages-long documents)

Autostep mode

Only for experienced presenters. Select the step interval time and let ZuiPrezi? automatically travel the path of your presentation, while you can focus on your talk instead. (20 second steps Pecha Kucha mode supported)

Fullscreen

Fullscreen mode is really useful during any presentation. You can access it by pressing the zero key when you are in the present mode. (note: you can not use the keyboard shortcuts in fullscreen more due to flash's fullscreen limitations)

Drawing tools

Use the pencil to sketch out your ideas, the marker to highlight your ideas, and arrows to put some relations in between.

Coming soon…

We are already working on the following features, and should be available in the near future.

• Share and collaborate on presentations. Currently only single authors are allowed.
• Upload videos in any format. Today only flv is supported.
• Import PPT files directly into zui, skipping the PDF step in between.
• Place videos from Youtube, images from Flickr directly into zui. Use your account, or search for fitting media.
• Templates for new presentations
• Search and navigate-by-typing in a zui map

Known issues

There are about 50 bugfixes we did, however, there are still things that need to be fixed:

• Accented characters don't display properly, and non Latin input is inconsistent.
• Offline presentations might have a strange layout on some machines
• Lots of text can degrade performance, even its its tiny and not readable
• Texts and graphics imported as PDF are heavier than ones created in Zuiprezi