Live slideshows
How does it work?
Swipe ( http://www.swipe.to ) is still in the beta phase. Everything happens via your browser so you don’t need to install any software. After the registration procedure, your personal dashboard is opened. It immediately launches a presentation full of handy tips and tricks. You can start creating your own presentation by clicking on New Deck - presentations are called “decks” here. Next, you can upload your material or drag files from your desktop directly to the module. Swipe also accepts graphic files (JPG, BMP, PNG, RAW, Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator files, etc.), as well as PDF files. Every uploaded file is shown as an individual slide, and you can change their order using the mouse.
Tip. In this beta phase, there are no restrictions on the number or the size of the files you want to use in your presentation.
Adding extras. You can insert an online video from YouTube or Vimeo as a slide by opening the left-hand menu. You only need to enter the URL, and Swipe will take care of the rest. However, and this reveals a major shortcoming of this service, there are no options for inserting text in the module itself. In other words, your written message should already be present in the material you upload. Moreover, there’s no library of arrows, symbols, lines or other graphical elements.
Share with your customers
Sharing. The presentations you create in Swipe are given a unique URL (like http://swipe.to/12abc ). You can share this with, for example, your customers via e-mail, Facebook, etc. and they can manually browse through the slides. The bar at the bottom shows the number of views of your presentation so far. But an even more useful feature of Swipe is that it lets you run your presentation yourself via the Control Live button in this same bar, which turns green. When you move to the next slide, this also happens in real time on everyone’s screen who is following your presentation on their device at that moment.
Tip. We think that it’s best to complement such a streaming slideshow with live comments via, for example, Skype.
Note. All your decks are “private” by default. This means that initially you’re the only person who can view the presentations after logging in and, if necessary, edit them. If you want to share a slideshow with others, you should set it to “public”. You can also insert a Swipe slideshow into your own website via an embed code. How to do this is detailed at: http://beta.swipe.to/help/embedding .
For every screen. Another cool feature is the “responsive design” of the Swipe presentations: this means that they will be adapted automatically to whatever screen on which they are displayed - including smartphones or tablets.
Final conclusion
The creative possibilities offered by Swipe are very limited, and yet this tool can prove useful, especially because of its Control Live function. You should be aware, however, that Swipe doesn’t work flawlessly in the current beta phase: for example, we failed to play a YouTube video on our iPhone - but it worked on our computer.
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