I looked around for some time for a freeware to convert PowerPoint documents to flash (.swf) for publishing to web sites and have found only three alternatives. Both have their pros and cons, but I will just list them and not go into much details.
To test I have picked a 12 slide presentation heavy with graphics and animations. Here is what I think:
AJSoft PPT2SWF – offers a very basic user interface and very few options. Quality and dimensions can be set. Be careful not to switch to other applications during conversion, because it will capture the topmost window for some reason. I couldn’t quite make it work with transition effects either. Overall I would use this one if all other options are exhausted. The generated .swf was quite much bigger than the presentation itself.
authorPOINT Lite – Most options of the three and most polished user interface. The UI was very intuitive, even though it needs some more work on the import dialog. authorPOINT supports slide notes and titles, presenter’s logo, batch conversion for queuing multiple files (a very useful feature since the conversion may be slow). The produced flash presentation is very nice looking and you can choose from several different templates for the presentation and the presentation contains a Print button. The generated folder with files was about twice as small than the .ppt file and took about 25% of the time it took PPT2SWF. Very nice application and strongly recommended! This would be my first choice when I do a conversion.
Speechi Light – Installs as a add-on to PowerPoint and creates it’s own menu. There are no settings at all in the light version. Just a simple Print to Flash. It generated the smallest set of files about 20% of the .ppt file size and was the fastest. The quality of the generated view is very good, but it has the large Speechi logo in two places in the presentation. It would be my second choice if authorPOINT didn’t work. Another annoyance is that in order to download and install you must register with their web-site and activate the product after installation. Generated content on the left.
My conclusion is that authorPOINT Lite is far ahead of the other two in both capabilities and options for generated content.
JkDefrag is a fast and easy to use disk defragmenter with a very low overhead. The program is very small in size (the whole download is about 320k) and it is portable. Just unpack the executable(s) and run it. There is a command line version, which is very useful for scheduling defragmentations on a regular basis.
Another great feature is the screen saver option, which enables you to set it to work whenever windows turns on the screen saver. You can also set a minimum time interval between defragments, so it doesn’t unnecessarily defragment the disk every time the screensaver starts.
It features several data optimization strategies. Another feature I find very useful is that it can defrag individual folders and files. Overall probably the best freeware defragmenter (and possibly better than many commercial ones). It needs some polishing of the user interface, but otherwise a perfect replacement of the standard windows defragmenter.
Disk Explorer Professional helps you organize your CD/DVD/Zip/Floppy or other media collection. It creates a searchable database of all files, looking in archives and extended descriptions like file_id.diz, readme.txt, etc. It will also look for image and audio attributes and metadata. It can also create thumbnails from the images for easier preview.
It is a very powerful and customizable application, coming with a variety of filters for extracting information from numerous file formats.
MP3TAG is an extremely powerful application to edit metadata (ID3 tags, Vorbis comments, etc.) in a variety of audio formats (including mp3, flac, ape, m4a, mp4, m4b, ogg, etc.). It also allows to update tags from filenames and directories, update filenames and directories from tags, updates the whole or parts of the tags.
It also features powerful export with user defined templates, tag import from amazon, freedb, and other online databases. For those interested in other than English languages it supports UTF-8 and Unicode.
Awesome and strongly recommended software for managing the tags of your mp3 collection.
MPEG Audio Collection (a.k.a. MAC) is a powerful companion to MP3TAG. It creates a searchable database from your audio archive, reading file information and metadata (ID3, Vorbis comments, APE, etc.). MAC also supports generating variety of reports, in .txt, .html and .dif formats. Even though it has not been updated since 2003, it is still a worthy utility to have on your computer.
August 17th, 2007
1:01 am
PIM
I have tried many different encrypted password storage softwares and KeePass is so far the best. It is using very strong encryption algorithms for the file where the passwords are saved and has a nice and clean user interface. It also features special password edit controls, that are protecting against password spying software.
The passwords can be grouped in categories in an explorer like interface. The features I treasure the most are that the password database and the program are portable. Just copy them to an USB drive and start from there. It also supports plugins for extending it’s functionality, Import/Export, etc. Another nice feature is the password generator, using a pattern and showing the password strength.
AJSoft PPT2SWF – offers a very basic user interface and very few options. Quality and dimensions can be set. Be careful not to switch to other applications during conversion, because it will capture the topmost window for some reason. I couldn’t quite make it work with transition effects either. Overall I would use this one if all other options are exhausted. The generated .swf was quite much bigger than the presentation itself.
authorPOINT Lite – Most options of the three and most polished user interface. The UI was very intuitive, even though it needs some more work on the import dialog. authorPOINT supports slide notes and titles, presenter’s logo, batch conversion for queuing multiple files (a very useful feature since the conversion may be slow). The produced flash presentation is very nice looking and you can choose from several different templates for the presentation and the presentation contains a Print button. The generated folder with files was about twice as small than the .ppt file and took about 25% of the time it took PPT2SWF. Very nice application and strongly recommended! This would be my first choice when I do a conversion.
Speechi Light – Installs as a add-on to PowerPoint and creates it’s own menu. There are no settings at all in the light version. Just a simple Print to Flash. It generated the smallest set of files about 20% of the .ppt file size and was the fastest. The quality of the generated view is very good, but it has the large Speechi logo in two places in the presentation. It would be my second choice if authorPOINT didn’t work. Another annoyance is that in order to download and install you must register with their web-site and activate the product after installation. Generated content on the left.
