Glide Present II

I've been away from this blog for too long. I stumbled upon it today while looking for something, and I remembered that it was here. When I got here, I started reading the entries and thought I should continue with Glide and their offerings. This entry is about their presenter, as you can see from the title.

My first encounter with Present was not so good, I obviously was in a hurry, or was expecting it to be more like PowerPoint. Today, I had a bit more time and was expecting it to be different from PP. I created a test presentation with about five pages. The experience was smooth and straightforward. When I tried to save the presentation, it took longer than expected, but worked OK. Those were the pros. The cons are not directly related to Present, but rather to some 'logistics' surrounding it.

Glide Present provides an Export feature. The only export options are PowerPoint and PDF, which is fine. But the problem with their export is that it does not happen right away; it is queued for later export. That later export never occurred! I looked around the site to see if there's some way to know how long I have to wait in queue, or to cancel the export, but there was no indicator whatsoever. Export is a great feature, but definitely needs to be improved.

Another good feature provided by Glide is eMail. Direct from Present, you can click the eMail button, and it will pop up a window with a standard email client 'Compose' page. Your current presentation is attached to the email already, just enter the recipient's address, subject and body and you're all set. Or are you?

Your recipient will be surprised to find that there is no attachment, just a link in the mail body to the presentation on Glide website. They will get another surprise when they are prompted to enter their password. And finally, the shock, when they enter their password (assuming they are registered Glide members), they will see the password as it is being typed, there are no stars (****) to hide it. A minor bug, yes, but after the bad experience so far, it kinda adds up.

After your recipient is logged in, they are presented with a page with options to view or download the presentation. The view option worked fine, but the download option opened an empty page and it would not download. Shame that such an important feature has not been given the time it deserves.

To conclude, Glide has a good presenter, good export and sharing options (email), but they don't work as they should at this moment. I will send Glide my notes and hopefully they will get things fixed.

Seeya next time.