LATEST RELEASE
We are progressing quickly to our
upcoming public beta launch and pushed a major new build last week
that
fixes tons of issues and adds some often requested new features. Before
we get to the new stuff, we just want to send out a huge thanks to the
over
300 beta testers who have sent in bug reports. We are a small team
(smaller than most of you might think) and your support and feedback
has been
tremendously helpful. Please keep it up!
So here's some of the stuff we just released:
Scalability Improvements
The SlideRocket servers have been
running beyond our expectations. We've let in over 7,500 beta users and
had no
unplanned downtime this year. But we haven't sat still and are working
hard to make sure that we can handle a large load of silmutaneous users
as well
as large groups of people collaborating together within a single
organization or across multiple organizations. This new release has a
lot of changes
underneath the hood to make sure things run smoothly as we grow. Most
of them won't directly impact your experience but, one that will
is...
Improved Startup Speed
Due to optimizations in how and when SlideRocket loads data, you should now see about an 85% speed improvement
in startup when logging into SlideRocket.
Playback Performance
A few people have commented on the
lag between clicking to go to the next slide and when the slide loaded.
Obviously, this is a big difference between SlideRocket and desktop
tools since we are loading data from a remote server instead of your
local hard
drive. With this new version of SlideRocket, the next slide or video is
pre-cached once the current slide has finished loading. As long as you
don't
click too quickly, you'll notice near instant transitioning to the next
slide and no longer have to wait for video to buffer.
Auto-Recovery
Probably the number one issue that
was frustrating users was losing unsaved work if their connection timed
out
or they hit an unrecoverable bug. With this release we've introduced
auto-recovery of unsaved work. We think this is a better solution than
just
auto-saving all the time since you can decide if you want to recover
anything you wasn't saved the next time you connect. Rest assured,
you aren't
working without a safety net anymore. And, if that's not enough, we
also added....
Presentation Versioning
We've had the ability to revert to
a previous version of a slide for a little while but with this new
release,
you can also revert to a previous version of your entire presentation. Every time you save the presentation a new version is created that you
can
revert to. Deleted slides and assets can all be recovered if needed.
Improved Flickr Import
We've got a ton of plans for
integrating with external content services but we felt that the current
Flickr
import needed some improvements immediately. First of all, we've added
options for sorting your results which should help you find the right
image
faster. We also automatically add attribution tooltips to creative
commons licensed-images now. And, finally, now when you import a Flickr
image it's
imported into your asset library as opposed to just linked back to
Flickr. This takes up a little bit of disk space but saves you from
worrying if the
image is removed or when you want to work offline.
Collaboration
Some of the biggest changes in this new release were around enabling
collaboration within and across organizations. SlideRocket lets you
share
assets, slides, and presentations with others while setting user and
group-based permissions. We've got a little bit more testing to do on
collaboration features and plan to start letting people use these new
features this week.
Presentation Audio
We've always had the ability to playback an audio file per slide but,
due to popular request, we've also added the feature to set an audio
file to
play across all your slides. Coupled with slide auto-advancing and
looping features, you can now create unattended presentations to run
in
SlideRocket.
Image Cropping
Another obvious one. You can now non-destructively crop and scale images within SlideRocket.
We hope you like the new features and performance improvements. As always please send your ideas and
observations to feedback@sliderocket.com.
