RemarkablyCreative.com

Dazzling Zero-Effort Slideshows with Animoto

In a nutshell: Animoto.com generates slick, eye-catching slideshows edited to match the pace and tone of music you select. The result isn't always perfect -- but any service that delivers this much dazzle for this little effort deserves a place in the creative worker's bag of tricks! Sign up using discount code huvtxyne, and you'll get five bucks off.

The End of Slideshows?
There are dozens of software titles out there capable of converting your photos into a slideshow. With a click of a mouse, you can add music. Another click, and the "Ken Burns effect" will set your photos into motion. Dressed up with some lively music and eye-catching animation, even your Uncle Ed's fuzzy vacation photos can seem to tell a story.

Automatically generated slideshows are convenient, but they have their limitations. Because the software doesn't know what's in the picture, it may pan away from the focal point of the photo or -- worse -- zoom in for a close-up of the wart on Aunt Edna's nose. A poorly chosen soundtrack can transform bland slides into a truly disturbing multimedia experience.

And -- until now -- the number one problem with automatically generated slideshows has been this: due to their limited set of transitions and their dreamy pace, they all tend to look alike.

That's where Animoto.com comes in.

Together 2.2 Update Released

Reinvented Software released Together 2.2 today, adding great new functionality to one of my favorite tools.

Together is my personal digital "cabinet of wonders" -- a secure storage space for everything from random scraps of information to archived copies of completed projects. There's no end to what I can stick in there: photos of books I want to read, titles of movies I want to rent, PDFs of web pages I want to read later, links to intriguing blog posts, logos I've completed in Vector Designer, slideshows I've created in Keynote, video clips, banners -- you name it.

Larry Lessig's Dazzling Visual Presentations

I've seen great presentations ruined by bad presenters ... and bad presentations saved by good presenters ... but here's one of those rare moments when a great presentation gets paired with a great presenter:

The fireworks start about forty-five seconds into the clip. I love the speed of the presentation -- the rapid-fire flow of ideas and images -- but also the way Larry Lessig uses bold, screen-dominating images to identify and reinforce key information.

This approach simply isn't possible when a presenter:

a) wants someone else to advance her slides for her

b) doesn't know the material well

c) is imprisoned by a bullet-point mentality

d) thinks people actually want a hundred-page print out of the presentation to take home.

Insight: an effective presentation -- one that makes great use of the medium's ability to capture attention by catching the eye -- simply can't be replicated on a printed page.

Creating Documentation the Easy Way with ScreenSteps

When I started my career, I did a lot of high-speed documentation creation. It wasn't uncommon, in fact, for my unscrupulous boss to advertise software classes, wait to see how many people would sign up, buy the software on a Wednesday, give it to me Wednesday night, and expect me to deliver a customized, fully-illustrated manual (and teach from it!) on Thursday morning.

Yesterday, I sat down to create yet another user manual -- this time, for a multi-million dollar videoconferencing system that, remarkably, seems to have been sold to The Company without so much as an instruction book.

I admit I've been procrastinating a bit, mostly because I dreaded doing all the cutting, pasting, and writing associated with this particular project. But thanks to a remarkable new tool -- ScreenSteps -- I was able to create an attractive, comprehensive fifty-two page instruction manual ... with full-color screenshots and step-by-step procedures ... in less than five hours.*