Electric Rain StandOut Steps Up

by Don Burnett

Today Electric Rain introduced a public beta of their StandOut Presentation solution. StandOut lets you create very compelling and visually exciting presentations. Why am I talking about it here? Well it's a very new professional WPF application and it integrates with the Expression Studio line including Expression Blend. You can actually use Blend with it to produce presentation templates (Design Kits).

StandOut Presentation Solution consists of two software applications: StandOut Designer Edition. For business, StandOut Presenter Edition enables placement of messaging and content into design kits. The results you can achieve with this software is very cool. It allows you to mix design with content to deliver extremely high quality presentations. The user interface is first rate with a drag and drop design surface.

One of the most impressive features of the Designer is that it imports PowerPoint designs, so if you have a presentation in PowerPoint that you want to enhance it will import slides. You get the full power of WPF with this application and the quality of the output will put your presentations ahead of the game of anyone *JUST* using PowerPoint alone.

I will have a more in-depth walk through upcoming. The big advantage of this program is the change in the presentation design workflow, you can have a designer setup the presentation for you with the designer program. The presenter version doesn't even need to go back to design, to edit and change the presentation, if you have fluid changing information in your presentation this program can help you to make changes on the fly if necessary while keeping the integrity of the presentation.

Technorati tags: Electric Rain, StandOut, PowerPoint, Improve your Presentations, Windows Vista

Swift 3d 5.0 Supports Silverlight

by Don Burnett

Animation solutions that support Silverlight compatible XAML output seem to be blossoming as acceptance of Silverlight is growing by leaps and bounds.. Interestingly enough they are only to version 4.5 on the Mac yet. That must say something about web artists using PCs, and this company is increasingly targeting Windows users.

Electric Rain's Swift 3d 5.0 animation powerhouse tool now supports Silverlight compliant XAML export (along with WPF)..

The exciting thing about their output is that it works just like their Flash add-in.. So, you can do all the cool things you see people doing in Adobe Flash with Swift3d now in Microsoft Silverlight. The XAML is also quite compliant with Expression Blend, so you'll be able to integrate this tool with Expression Studio... Some of you might ask why then would you want to use Swift3d and Zam3d both? The answer is simple. Zam3d is aimed at WPF based real time 3D interactivity.

While Swift 3D 5.0 can output three dimensional animations in Silverlight as 2D frames (like it does again for Adobe Flash), Silverlight is missing hardware accelerated 3D support. Swift3D is a very cool product and it is proving that you don't need a 3D engine present to still show wonderful rendered 3D results.

Some of the advantages Swift3D has as an animation package are full-featured support for many things you only find in professional animation packages. And very dynamic import and export in many formats.

The Converted scores with work on a new Silverlight compliant version..

The converted is a very cool tool that's in development right now (you can buy it here). The author of this tool has much in the way of animation expertise, and considers the work one that will see much updating as Silverlight itself matures into a more rich and efficient animation environment. For now though this tool is very slick.

Technorati tags: Electric Rain, XAML, Silverlight, the Converted, SWF to XAML, Swift3d version 5.0, XAML and Silverlight Export. Quality 3D now on Silverlight.