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.

Glide OS Present

After seeing Google's presentation software attempt, I thought to myself "this is because it's on the web, they can't really make it too sophisticated". Then I heard about Glide OS having a significantly more sophisticated presenter that can take out MS PowerPoint. I signed up for Glide and gave it a try. I will share with you my first attempt at it.

First glance will tell you it's far more advanced than Google's. A right click of the mouse will tell you that it is Flash based. I'm a fan of Flash and it's capabilities, it's a very powerful system, no doubt. The presenter is features-rich, yes, but it takes some getting used to. I had a hard time figuring out how to control the slides and the text. It differs from what I'm used in PowerPoint. I don't know why they decided to make it different, I want things to work the way I'm used to them working, I don't want to re-learn everything from scratch just to use your system. I got frustrated and decided to come write this blog instead of struggling with it and postponed creating the presentation until a later time. You will hear about that in a coming blog entry, so stay tuned.

My thoughts are that Glide provides a good presenter, but it will take a little time to master it. Google need to improve their presenter and they need to make it easier to use than Glide and PowerPoint. I look forward to finding a true replacement for PowerPoint, which I never liked, and I hope that replacement arrives soon.