Not quite ready for prime time

A while ago I compared the Qarbon ViewletBuilder to Wink. A colleague and I just finished putting together a presentation we’ll be delivering virtually at a local conference – Best Practices in eLearning. The idea is that we’re going to deliver this Powerpoint w/o actually standing there to deliver it. Many of the other presenters have just uploaded papers, and a lot have uploaded Powerpoint converted to HTML, but we wanted to do something a little more flashy.

A couple of months ago I had seen a demo of Macromedia Breeze, which converts Powerpoint to Flash, including narration. That’s what we were going to use to deliver this presentation, but our Learning Commons wasn’t able to get a license secured in time for the presentation submission deadline (today). So I went back to the well and took a look at the Qarbon ViewletPresenter, which does pretty much the same thing.

Downloaded a demo and saw immediately that it wasn’t as polished as I had come to appreciate with the other Qarbon products. But it worked. Mostly. Sorta. We ended up buying a copy ($99US – not too bad) because we knew we weren’t going to have Breeze available. Spent lots of time recording the narration over our Powerpoint and did the conversion to Flash. ViewletPresenter didn’t like some of our slide templates, and wouldn’t render them completely on the web, and would also neglect to display some screenshots we had embedded. Audio worked great. Technical support at Qarbon was spectacular (as they always have been in my experience) and worked with me to troubleshoot. They ended up allowing me to download their next beta release of the product, and after I changed the slide templates to something slightly less complex we got it all to work. But only in Internet Explorer. Not in Mozilla 🙁 I’m still waiting to hear back from Qarbon to see if this is a known bug or something their working on or what. I’ll be happy to share the presentation at the end of August once the conference is done.

Your mileage might vary. If you’ve got a short presentation you want to convert it might work perfectly the first time. Not sure what to say about the IE glitch – I hope they get that worked out in the next release. As it is, you can still download a demo version of the software and run it through its paces – your end result will have a big watermark on it, but you should be able to tell if it works otherwise. I suspect $99 is much cheaper than Breeze.

So things to do in the not-to-distant future: Compare ViewletPresenter with Breeze once our campus gets a license. Compare ViewletPresenter with Microsoft Producer, which does a similar conversion thing allowing both audio and video to stream along with your PowerPoint online. This might’ve worked well for us but I only learned about it yesterday, and I’ll bet it also doesn’t play nicely with Mozilla. Oh, there’s an even slightly cheaper version of ViewletPresenter available at http://netron.imediasoft.net/ – it seems that Qarbon is licensing the product from Netron. but I have no experience with Netron tech support, nor do I know if they’re working to upgrade their product. Out of the box right now they appear to be identical though.