New features – Adding Messages and Comments pages and allowing public commenting and changing slide background

In order to enhance the slidecast creation functionality, and allow users easily track activities and comments on their accounts, showbeyond team just released four major new features, including adding “Messages” and “Comments” pages, allowing public commenting and changing slide background during editing process.

The “Messages” page is set as the default page under “my SHOWBEYOND”. With this page, users can easily track any community activities such as commenting, adding favorites and idles. The “Comments” page lets users conveniently view and respond to comments on their stories and delete inappropriate ones. Also, the comment function is now available to the public so that everyone can contribute to discussions.

In addition, the system now allows users to select and change slide backgrounds during entire story creation process. The slide backgrounds can be changed individually or in a batch. With such function users can create a story with many different backgrounds, which can make presentation much more appealing.

New Feature – Manual Duration Setting (including batch setting)

In order to make duration adjustment more precise and more efficient Showbeyond team introduced manual duration setting including batch setting.

Manual duration setting allows users directly input duration to individual slide or apply it to all slides in the story (batch setting).  Also, in the “Slidecast” step, after you add a  background music the length of the music now can be displayed if you mouse over the background music indicator. 

In addition, during the process, showbeyond team combined the “Arrange Slide” and the “Slidecast” steps into one step to simplify the story creation process. 

Simplified sign-up and allowing update of user’s email

Showbeyond has simplified sign-up process.  With the current process, a new user can immediately sign up to showbeyond by simply creating user name and password and providing a valid email address.  Confirmation from user’s email is no longer required.  

Also, users are now able to update their email address at ”My Showbeyond” \”Account” whenever they need. 

In addition, due to this change, any user now can create multiple accounts by just using one email address.  Therefore, a user can conveniently sign up multiple accounts for different purposes. 

     

Hotmail and MSN mail

According to reports, some of users have experiences of losing of their mails or not timely receiving their mails when they use these mails to sign up new accounts or share stories. We suggest that a new user should use alternative mail to sign up for new accounts. We will continue monitor the situation and notify you when the condition changes.

Streamlining Story Creation Process

In order to make story creation easier and smoother, Showbeyond team streamlined the entire creation process with clearer, simpler and more convenient page layouts. Significant enhancements include:  on-spot guidance on each creation step, slide selection slider at the Slidecast step, position indicators for text editing, and thumbnail shortcuts for narration and image positioning.  Other improvements include top-aligning descriptive text when there is no title input, top-aligning image  when there is text input for standard format, and allowing image to be positioned to slide center for wide format. 
 
We believe such enhancements will greatly improve your experience of story/presentation creation.  Make a suggestion, we will listen and make the system better.

New feature: Editing Stories/Presentations after Sharing

With a great effort of the team, Showbeyond just released an important new feature, which allows users to edit their stories/presentations after they have been shared. Such feature not only significantly increases usability and reusability of stories/presentation, but also greatly improves management of users’ contents.

With this feature, users not only can add, delete, and edit content elements such as images, audios and text, but also can edit sharing parameters such as story name, share option, categories, tags and etc. For many presentation items such as photo portfolios, self- introductions, class presentations, and etc, users can keep updating with minimum effort.

Edit function is very easy to use. When users login showbeyond, “Edit” link will be shown at “My Stories” page under My SHOWBEYOND. It is also shown at view page right after story titles when you play/read your own stories. When you click the link, it will bring you right back to “Arrange Order” page, just as you continue a story in progress. Although any change will be stored in the system, the story will not be updated for viewers until you commit update under “Update Story”.

It should be noted such new feature only works for story you created after this release. You can not edit stories shared before this release.

Adding “Stumbleupon” link at view page

Recently, we updated view page with some new looks and feels.  We also added “Stumble It” link to the page, so users can more conveniently share their discoveries with their friends. 

Updating Player and Providing HTML Link

The player was updated last night to including indicators of story durations and slide numbers.  The information is very useful, particularly, when stories are embedded into users’ blogs or websites. 

 

In addition to URL, HTML link is provided to users.  When users past this link to their blogs or websites, a thumbnail of the story will be displayed instead of a URL and nicely improve appearance of an entry.    

Updating text editor & adding title slide layout

With updated text editor, users can select alignments, change font size and grey scale, create bullets and perform spelling check.  With new title slide, user can easily create a title slide or make short statements with their stories.  These new features will significantly enhance system presentation power, particularly, for users who prefer text to tell story.

New features – Importing images from Flickr and embedding uploaded background sound file

With the new features, users can directly import a batch of images from Flickr to create story.  It works in a similar way as users import images from Picasa.   Also, users now can upload a sound file and embed it as a background sound.  It works in similar way as embedding URL except users directly upload sound files from their computers.  Sound embedding feature is very useful to users who want to share their existing music or podcast along with their slidecasts.  In addition, the system also extended the maximum duration of a slide to 5 minutes for convenient use.  For more detail on how to upload, see Podcast with Your Slides under Q&A.