Blodget’s Blog

Artpad.art.com is a free painting program. I think it’s Flash based.

Once you complete your painting, you can play it back. I did this and captured the playback using SnapZ Pro on my MacBook and saved the movie as a H.264 mov file.

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VCASMO.com is a free web service that provides storage and display of presentations. The unique thing about this one is that you can display video and slides side-by-side and the slides can be timed to change with the video. Most people are using this for lectures with Powerpoint slides, but as this sample shows, it can also be used for tutorials. Besides embedding the presentation on your own site (like I did above), you can link to it on their website.

I like that you can have hot-links in the slides. I also like that the player can display thumbnails of the slides and that you can navigate to a slide by clicking the thumbnail. This gives you chapter stops. (Click the little black arrow on the right of the slide window to see the thumbnails).

The full screen playback look good and they nicely provide you with embeddable versions – a small one for you blog (like the one above) and a bigger one for full page display.

The editing is very straightforward. The video is displayed above thumbnails of the slides and arrows point from each slide to a time line. You just click and drag the arrows to position each slide. You can play back the video to check your timing and position each slide based on the audio.

You can also present other file types including audio, images, and PDF files. Presentations can also have subtitles in different languages and visitors can add subtitles.

Another cool feature they have is called “Instant VCASMO”. This lets you pair slideshow.net presentations with Youtube videos.

Altogether it’s a great feature set. The website, however, still feels like it’s in beta. Site navigation is funky. It’s hard to get back to your own dashboard. Also, there is no Help. But, hey, try it out!

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