Here it is, Empressr Lesson Series #1. Media: Uploads, Importing, and Creation!

The team here at Empressr is always working to make sure your experience with the Empressr platform is the BEST possible. Here is the first of a series of story boards designed to help you use some of our most exciting key features. Enjoy!

In my hast to start the weekend last Friday, I created my Empressr showing the new Adobe Kuler integration on our staging server, which of course is not accessible from the outside. My Bad. So here it is!

Today we are release version 5.3 of Empressr. What’s new is now you can choose color pallets from Adobe’s awesome product/service/social site Kuler.

Last week while we were in Amsterdam at The Next Web, we released an update to Empressr. In the editor there were just a series of minor bug fixes, the big release was enhancements to the Presenters Dashboard.

The biggest change is how we integrate Twitter.

1. We now highlight questions so that they are easier to identify in the stream, we also have the ability to filter the Tweet stream for only questions if you are doing a Q&A.
2. When you manually launch a tweet to the Empressr presentation we make that tweet sticky on top of the dashboard so that it is easy to close or reference what tweet is on the screen. Launching a new one will close the existing, select the close button and it remove it from the Empressr presentation.

Last week at Web 2.0 Expo #w2e Stowe Boyd @stoweboyd and Oliver Marks @olivermarks used Empressr as their tool to create and present their story on Enterprise 2.0. This presentation is a warm up to the bigger Enterprise 2.0 event that they are presenting in, taking place in Boston June 22-25th. The two took advantage of some of the cool new features, namely the Twitter FrontChannel to spearhead the Q & A session.

Stowe loved it because it gave him a chance to be able to choose the Tweet that was shown on the screen, users loved it because they got a chance to participate in the presentation. Stowe is going to be using Empressr around the world speaking during the next few months, I’ll keep you posted.

The Empressr

The Dashboard

Some of the features are:

• A timer so you can gauge the length or your presentation.
• You can show the hash tag on the presentation so your audience knows what hash to use.
• You can autorun the tweets, or select manual, in this mode you would launch each tweet to the screen.
• Presenter Notes, you see previous, current and next slides, they are also click-able as an additional navigation element.

Update:

A recent post on the Enterprise 2.0 Blog by Stowe Boyd
Open Enterprise 2009: Some Tweets From Web 2.0 Expo

Like I promised, new features are planned to roll out every other week.

What’s new this week.

yes you can now search and drag and drop YouTube videos from within Empressr, it works great and is really easy. A couple of items you should be aware of is that YouTube videos have to auto-play (at lest for now) and due to api restrictions you are only allowed one video per slide in empressr. There is no limitation on how many videos you use, so long as it’s one per slide.

To access the video panel click the Import control on the bottom navigation bar

That opens the panel that let’s you search for images on flickr, yahoo and google, and now videos on youtube.

Another feature is the ability to import you notes that you may of made in you powerpoint document, the notes will import in both the jpeg only and the editable versions that we offer. to edit or add your notes click the gear on the lower right hand corner of the slide in the sorter,

that opens the option panel, there are 3 areas in this panel, properties, info and Notes

To see your notes while presenting, you have to launch the notes and twitter dashboard by clicking this icon in the Empressr viewer window

That icon launches the Dashboard that you can then drag to your second monitor while presenting

A short list of some of the new features and changes to Empressr v.5

I don’t generally like long gaps in code pushes, but this particular push has some substantial changes in the underlying Empressr Engine. The first thing you will notice is that objects placed on the canvas are now selectable anywhere as opposed to having to grab a handle, the feedback as you move and manipulate objects is much tighter and responsive. This was a major redevelopment and the reason it took so long to push this version. A list of new things:

BIGGER — 

• Empressr now has a smaller application footprint aka uses less memory so you can now do bigger presentations without running the risk of running out of memory
• fullscreen slide sorter, making it easier to organize your presentation

FASTER —

• You’ll notice that both the application and the viewer load 100% faster than v.4 w00t
• We now only load fonts that you are using in your presentation and no longer load a default set, this saves about 1MB of things you may or may not have been using
• Flex 3, we are now Flex 3 which by default is substantially faster than Flex 2
• Optimized thumb-nailing with less server calls
• Optimized 3rd party api calls for faster results in your searches

STRONGER —

• Publish your Empressr as you save your work, less steps means more efficiency = happy users
• In-line preview of your work
• Import from PowerPoint will auto-preview

…and finally with this big new code push it is going to allow us to focus on bringing more detailed features for things like  text, video and images and much faster fashion, so stay tuned.
go create something now!

Code name: Hemingway

Incubating since: way too long ago!

What did we say we were going to do?

• Empressr is BIGGER — more features, more functionality, more AWESOME NESS.
• Empressr is FASTER — don’t blink. you WILL miss the loading bar? or WILL YOU? hmmmm…..
• Empressr is STRONGER — upgraded back-end… faster throughput… ready to do the heavy lifting for you.

What’s out there! Check it out!!

Have previous empressr’s that you created with the composr? No worries, they are all still there, and functional. We wouldn’t do that to ya now, would we? 

We are coming out with a Hemingway-inspired contest for all to participate in. Stay tuned..

To end a blog post about a release code named Hemingway, I thought I would sign off in similar 6-word story style invented by Hemingway.

Empressr Goodness Out. Eagerly Anticipating Feedback.

GLOBAL CITIZEN… OUT!

Hi, Empressr is going to be offline for the next 30 minutes as we update the databases and load the new code to the server. We don’t anticipate any problems and expect to be back online and rockin’ shortly.

Thanks

Bryan

Great new features released in the last couple of days…

1. Track, Track, Track — see who’s viewing your Empressr and how long they are interacting with it. Best used when emailing it to a friend.

2. Presentation Options - push it to the homepage, keep it hidden, and password protect your Empressr are now available.