280Slides Review (still in beta but worth a look anyway)

280Slides has hit the ground running, in a beta version that’s better than most production sites. It’s an online, browser-based application that lets you create PowerPoint slide decks, and save them as PDF to boot. Highlights:

• Create slide shows with a solidly professional interface that feels like the best of PowerPoint and Pages combined
• YouTube-style player with equally similar embed codes
• Instant publishing to SlideShare.net, allowing you to publish your presentation to a high PR-ranked site in seconds
• Attractive themes
• Import feature
• Ability to insert pictures and videos into a presentation
• Speaker’s notes
• Supports the Google Chrome browser
• Saves to PowerPoint, PDF, and OpenDocument

Here’s an embedded show I created in a very few minutes.

280Slides review: Pros

• Intuitive interface both for learning and for repeat use
• Very, very fast to create highly professional-appearing slide shows
• Makes creating text boxes on slides a breeze, far better than any similar product on the Web
• Nice public profile; more fodder for search engines
• Several nice templates
• Though beta, it’s ready for production use

280Slides review: Cons

• Slides don’t look as good viewed in PowerPoint
• Undo occasionally went too far, undoing more than I wanted (but this is a beta app)
• No master slide concept
• No watermark concept
• Themes are good but more is always good
• Limited to a fixed set of text sizes
• Can’t include a hyperlink in a slide

You know what would be great? A way to create video slide shows with the maximum automation computer technology allows. The feature set might look like this.

• Free
• Exceptionally easy to to learn. We internet marketers have enough on our plates
• Efficient to use
• Ability to take just about any kind of digital image in just about any format
• Lots of effects like the Ken Burns look, sepia tone, and so on
• Easy subtitles
• Generates a standalone movie file that could be downloaded
• Includes a bottomless well of free music in many different styles

Windows Photo Story 3 (free download) is just such a product. It is criminally underrated. It works on Windows 7, and as far as I know Vista and XP too. It lacks a few features many internet marketers would like, such as export to Apple movie formats or Flash, but there’s nothing insurmountable. Workflow is incredibly fast. The music feature is kind of interesting. Instead of using canned music files, it lets you choose a music style (funk, new age, classical-everything except hip-hop, disappointingly), mood, and part of the world, and it spits out an original composition. Obviously the quality isn’t anything you could turn into a hit single, but it has the two massive advantages of being acceptable and not posing any risk of lawsuits, because it’s not copywrited music.

If you’re a PC user, try Photo Story for the creation of your next video. You may be very pleasantly surprised.

I just finished a moderately ambitious video and all the images came from the free stock photography site stock.xchng. You have to be careful with “free” clip art or stock photography sites because the vast majority of them forbid the use of their images in commercial projects. stock.xchng is an exception, and the quality of images will surprise you. A very few of them have commercial restrictions, and some simply ask that you contact the contributor. Non-buyer beware. I can tell you that over 90% of the images I used were unencumbered, and the remaining onces required only notification, not permission.