It’s been over a year since we last covered online presentation tool Empressr. Tonight the company releases version 3 of its product, which has been rebuilt completely in Flex.
Much of the improvements in this third version are structural, so you might not see much on the surface. Among the noticeable improvements is a new film strip for viewing the slides in a presentation. Click on the middle button at the bottom of the player and you’ll see thumbnail previews of these slides. The editing tool also has a new interface and drag-n-drop functionality for images, movies, and flash files.
Empressr sports an impressively functional presentation tool accessible entirely through the web browser. The point is basically to bring PowerPoint online so you can easily share and collaborate on presentations.
Currently, Empressr prides itself in the ability to bring content into your slides from around the web. Movies and photos don’t need to be hosted by Empressr to be embedded in your presentations; you can pull them from Flickr, YouTube, etc. Completed presentations can also be embedded and published elsewhere on the web (such as in the bottom of this blog post). The editor provides professional snap-to-grid functionality and the ability to make presentations of varying dimensions, so presentations can potentially fitted to any aspect ratio necessary for page embedding.
Not yet available is the ability for groups to simultaneously work on a single presentation, although the company says it will debut this functionality (perhaps for premium members only) before too long. Empressr has also not yet made the leap back offline but the company will design an offline viewer in AIR for the first quarter of next year and an offline editor perhaps in the second quarter.