News

We released today the version 1.9.3 of Slide Effect Presentation Software (Professional and Standard Editions).

It is a maintenance release with just a few small bug fixes.

In details:

• Video Background: Distorsions on High quality movie export has been fixed.
• Video Objects: Fixed a problem when importing a movie with double extension, like “myvideo.avi.avi”.
• Export Video: Added a “Customize” button to help customize presets.
• Export Video: The “next” button is not anymore disabled until user choose a filename. Instead, it is enabled and display a popup if the filename is not set.
• Export Video: In case of error, the standard error dialog is now displayed (with a possibility to send a feedback to developers).

Trial, Standard and Pro editions have been updated and are available for all registered customers (using “Product Updates” page). Existing users who want to upgrade to the Professional edition can check the upgrade page.

We released today the version 1.9.2 of Slide Effect Presentation Software (Professional and Standard Editions).

It is a maintenance release with just a few small bug fixes.

In details:

• Corrected a problem when saving the project: File.Delete(_baseFile) sometimes throw an exception on some OS versions
• Corrected a problem with thumbnails: Sometimes an exception is thrown when loading thumbnails from cache.
• Corrected a problem with fur border: Sometimes a memory access violation was thrown.
• Corrected a display problem with some transitions: Using 3D objects on some transitions, some offset was shown: it is fixed.
• Video Playing: Sometimes a black frame was displayed at the end of the start transition: it is fixed.

Trial, Standard and Pro editions have been updated and are available for all registered customers (using “Product Updates” page). Existing users who want to upgrade to the Professional edition can check the upgrade page.

We released today the version 1.9.1 of Slide Effect Presentation Software (Professional and Standard Editions).

It is a maintenance release with just a few small bug fixes.

In details:

• Screensavers: Screensaver export fixed(Added a file that was missing in 1.9.0).
• Movie Objects: Movie playing error when browsing the presentation backward has been fixed.
• Memory Management: Corrected a problem with memory management preventing the application to run on some computers.
• Duplicate Slide on Trial edition: An error was displayed if user tried to duplicate a slide when the presentation has already 5 slides.

Trial, Standard and Pro editions have been updated and are available for all registered customers (using “Product Updates” page). Existing users who want to upgrade to the Professional edition can check the upgrade page.

We released today the version 1.9.0 of Slide Effect Presentation Software (Professional and Standard Editions).

This version add a lot of new features and enhancements, in short:

Text Gradients

It is now possible to choose between plain color and a colored gradient for texts in the presentation.

Help file

The help file has been completely rewritten and is available in English and French. It contains a lot of informations, tutorials, FAQs on Slide Effect.

Borders for images and movies

You can now add a border for images and movies as well as choosing an outline width and color. Several frame are available like rounded corners, fur, broken lines, …

Ken Burns Effect

This long awaited effect is now available. The Ken Burns effect is a popular name for a type of panning and zooming effect used in video production from still imagery.

It is available as Background effect, and as animation effect for movies and pictures.

Merge two presentations (Professional Edition)

You can now use a previous presentation or a set of slides from another presentation using the new functionality to merge two presentations. This feature is only available on Professional Edition.

Slide Thumbnails

Until now, the slide thumbnails on the left were static images depending of the template you chose when you created the slide. They are now completely dynamic and display the real content of each slides.

Project files are smaller

We worked a lot on optimizing the size of the project files and the output files generated by Slide Effect. They are now smaller than before (depending of the content, but for pictures it is possible to have a factor 15 reduction).

Shadow and reflexion effect now displayed on work area

Until now, when you chose to add a shadow or a reflexion to an object you had to launch the preview to check the result. From 1.9.0, these effects are displayed instantaneously on the work area.

Well that’s all… or not?

Besides these key points we added a lot of small enhancements to Slide Effect… in no particular order:

• Total time of the presentation is now displayed on the main tab
• Object animation have been reworked to blend smoothly between each others
• Faster display of slides
• Added Page Up/Page Down shortcut to browse rapidly the slides when editing
• Added an option to assign random transitions to the whole presentation
• New start/end/animation effects on several objects
• Movie export is faster on recent hardware
• Cube animation times can be customized
• [Professional Edition] Position, Angle and Scale are now displayed and editable on the right property panel

Change in the upgrade policy

Until today, our upgrade policy was “all upgrades free until 2.0.0”. As we are now in 1.9.0 and to avoid too much question about that, we changed this policy to, basically, “all upgrades free for 1 year”.

What does it means? you’ll have one year of free updates from the date you purchase the software. At the end of the year, the software will obviously continue to work, but if you want to upgrade to the latest version, you’ll have to pay a small fee to get 1 more year of upgrades.

Existing customers who had purchased Slide Effect in the last 12 months will have 1 year of upgrades for free. Older customer will receive 6 months for free.

Get the new version!

Trial, Standard and Pro editions have been updated and are available for all registered customers (using “Product Updates” page). Existing users who want to upgrade to the Professional edition can check the upgrade page.

We released today the version 1.8.2 of Slide Effect Presentation Software (Professional and Standard Editions).

It is a maintenance release with just a few small bug fixes.

In details:

• Browser: If the default browser is not found we use Internet Explorer, then, if not found we try with Firefox, and finally we do nothing.
• Italian Translation: Corrected some texts.
• Self Executable Export: Had some troubles with unicode characters used on internal filenames: it is fixed.
• Movie Export: On old hardware, since 1.8.0 the exported movies are black: it is fixed.
• Self Executable Export: Basic backgrounds with a foreground (for instance “Blackhole”) were not correctly exported. It is fixed

Trial, Standard and Pro editions have been updated and are available for all registered customers (using “Product Updates” page). Existing users who want to upgrade to the Professional edition can check the upgrade page.

We just released a new movie background package:

Free Background Movies Package: Looped Movies (2) contains 12 movies to use as background for your presentations.

This package is available for free on Add-Ons page for every users of Slide Effect Standard and Professional edition.

We released today the version 1.8.1 of Slide Effect Presentation Software (Professional and Standard Editions).

It is a maintenance release with just a few small bug fixes.

In details:

• HD Export: Corrected a problem with the audio codec that leads to a conversion error.
• Audio Export: When Play a sound was selected without any filename, the export wizard was displaying an error. This is fixed.
• 2D Text: Corrected an issue when text was starting by a carrage return on some effects.
• Version checker: A small popup is now automatically displayed if a new version is available.
• Browser: We now use default browser when opening a URL instead of Internet Explorer.
• Background Movie: Sound was lasting too long when exporting a looped movies in some cases.

Trial, Standard and Pro editions have been updated and are available for all registered customers (using “Product Updates” page). Existing users who want to upgrade to the Professional edition can check the upgrade page.

We released today the version 1.8.0 of Slide Effect Presentation Software (Professional and Standard Editions).

This version add a lot of long awaited features! Quick presentation:

Audio: add several audio files.

It is now possible to use several audio files into your presentation. A new Audio tab has been added to the user interface, and now you can choose, for every slides, which audio file you want to play.

You can also fade in or/and fade out each audio files.

Movie Export: bigger, better, faster!

The movie exportation wizard has been also completely reworked. Movie export is now considerably faster, you can export in much more formats (like HD-1080, xVid or even Lossless raw video output) and you will be able to change all the output settings to create the exact movie file you want.

Print your slides! (and don’t save a tree)

You can now print the slides of the presentation in several popular formats (slides, handouts or handouts with notes).

Multiple image importer

Do you have a directory full of pictures and you want to create a presentation with it? With the batch image importer, create your slide-show in one click.

Just create the template slide and select the source pictures directory, Slide Effect will create all the slides for you.

Talk Over Mode [Professional Edition]

Using the Professional Edition, it is now possible to record your voice and synchronize the whole presentation with it.

Music Synchronization wizard [Professional Edition]

Using the Professional Edition, it is now easier to fully synchronize images and music with the new music synchronization wizard.

Miscellaneous

Other than these new big features, there are a few new things that worth a look:

• Dutch Translation: Dutch Translation added. (Thanks to Bertus Roerade!)
• Wipe Transition: Added ease parameter.
• 2D Texts: Added “Rolling Credits” Animation Effect.
• 2D Texts: Added “Star Wars” Animation Effect.
• Program Options: New option to display the presentation on the secondary screen.

Trial, Standard and Pro editions have been updated and are available for all registered customers (using “Product Updates” page). Existing users who want to upgrade to the Professional edition can check the upgrade page.

Oh, I forgot…

Let’s take the opportunity of this new release (let’s call it “Christmas Release”!) to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2011. 2010 has been a crucial year for our business, as I started to work full time on it on march 2010. Until now I don’t regret this decision: it was one of the smartest decision I ever made in my entire professional life. There is, still, a long way to go to make Slide Effect as successful as it deserve, but the sales and the feedback of users are on a positive trend, so thank to all my customers for your trust and your confidence (and your patience with some nasty bugs, too!) Happy New Year everybody: 2011 will be a great year for Slide Effect!

BEX, SWITZERLAND – October 27, 2010 – Devsoft, developer of multimedia products, including the award winning Slide Effect Presentation Software, today announced the immediate release of Banner Effect: a Windows software to create Flash banners with just a few mouse clicks.

Banner Effect is a desktop software aimed to banners creators, designers or webmaster in need of a visual tool to create small Flash animations and banners. You won’t need to understand Flash or ActionScript to create a banner: choose the format, create your slides, add some text and images on it and, finally, add some effects and transitions to make your banner impressive.

click to enlarge

Once your banner is ready, compress it to the size needed and simply save it on your website. Banner Effect also provides a special Google Adwords mode to create banners usable as Google Ads.

Banner effect is available in two editions: a free trial edition and a complete edition for $99.

For more information about Banner Effect, please visit: http://www.banner-effect.com

About Devsoft

Devsoft is an independent Swiss-based software company. Our core business is creating software for working with images, realtime 3D, music or video… In one word, multimedia.

Our products include:

• Banner Effect: A flash banner creator to create banners in a few clicks.
• Slide Effect: A presentation software tool to create impressive presentations.

If you want to know more about our company, please visit http://www.devsoft.ch company site (French-speaking).

We released today the version 1.7.5 of Slide Effect Presentation Software (Professional and Standard Editions).

It is a maintenance release with just a few small bug fixes.

In details:

• Save project: Display in a more user friendly an error if the target directory is not writable by the current user.
• 3D Texts: Corrected an issue when displaying 3D texts with spaces and start/end particles effect.
• 3D Texts: Corrected an issue when displaying empty 3D texts.

Trial, Standard and Pro editions have been updated and are available for all registered customers (using “Product Updates” page). Existing users who want to upgrade to the Professional edition can check the upgrade page.