InfoTart

Last week, I listed FloPrompter on Amazon.com for the very first time, so I thought it would be cool to see what kinds of books they sell on presentation skills and public speaking. I found a few that look promising based on the title and description. Of course, whether they’re actually interesting or useful is yet to be determined… Still, if you’ve purchased FloPrompter and are looking to use it to help you hone your presentation skills, you might consider these titles as a starting point.

• Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear: 3.5 stars on 72 reviews. Amazon.com Sales Rank: #893 in Books. $16.47
• Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story: 5 stars on 28 reviews. Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,827 in Books. $11.55
• The Exceptional Presenter: A Proven Formula to Open Up and Own the Room: It got 4 stars on 11 reviews. Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,993 in Books. $14.93
• Never Be Boring Again: Make Your Business Presentations Capture Attention, Inspire Action and Produce Results: 4.5 stars on 20 reviews. Amazon.com Sales Rank: #24,217 in Books. $13.57
• Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 to Create Presentations That Inform, Motivate, and Inspire: Not rated. Amazon.com Sales Rank: #43,656 in Books. $19.79.
• Knockout Presentations: How to Deliver Your Message with Power, Punch, and Pizzazz: 4.5 stars on 21 reviews. Amazon.com Sales Rank: #47,456 in Books. $16.47
• The Teleprompter Manual: 4 stars with one review. Amazon.com Sales Rank: #513,147 in Books. $19.95
• Dead Man Talking How to Use a Teleprompter Effectively: It’s a $99 DVD. (Try to get the office to pay for it. ;-))

That’s a pretty good start for me, too! Now to reserve some time to hang at the library and do some reading…

FloPrompter customers often ask me which wireless presenters work with FloPrompter. The short answer is that as long as the device notes that it will work with Microsoft PowerPoint, it ought to work just fine with FloPrompter, too.

Last week, I listed FloPrompter on Amazon.com for the very first time, so I thought I would look on Amazon to see what kinds of wireless presenters they sell. Here’s a short list of the items I found that look like they’ll work. Note that I have only tested one of these items with FloPrompter, but the others look like good alternates.

• Keyspan PR-US2 Presentation Remote: This is the only wireless presenter I’ve tested with FloPrompter. It works great. And wouldn’t you know it? Amazon is selling it for about $20 less than I paid for it at a local computer & electronics shop. Retail: $48.99
• Microsoft Wireless Presenter 3000 Gray: Because it has the Microsoft brand name and says it works with PowerPoint, I expect that it would work well with FloPrompter, as well. Retail: $45.00.
• Targus Wireless Presenter with Laser Pointer: Retail: $27.95
• Kensington 33374 Wireless Presenter with Laser Pointer: Retail: $45.99

Check it out! I just posted FloSpace FloPrompter on Amazon.com! The page went live today:

http://www.amazon.com/FloSpace-FloPrompter/dp/B000VQBNAO 

It will even show up in search results for “teleprompter” when you type that into the text box at the top of the page.

Call me just a trifle thrilled to see the fruits of my labor being sold on one of the largest online marketplaces in the universe!

One of our FloPrompter customers works for a karaoke band in California. He recently purchased a Savant Elite programmable USB foot switch from Kinesis Corp to control the teleprompter scrolling while also playing an instrument. The foot switches come in one-, two- and three-pedal versions.

What’s cool is that you can program the device to activate any key on your computer’s keyboard. He got the three-pedal foot switch and set it up to activate these keys:

• Left Pedal: Activates the F8 key to scroll the teleprompter slower.
• Center Pedal: Activates the F12 key to stop and start scrolling the teleprompter window.
• Right Pedal: Activates the F9 key to scroll the teleprompter faster.

The customer reports that the foot switch works fantastically with FloPrompter. How cool is that!

Kinesis Corp. Savant Elite Programmable USB Foot Switches: www.kinesis-ergo.com

I just uploaded a small update to the FloSpace web site for FloPrompter version 2.25. This minor release features three features requested by FloPrompter customers:

• File-Specific Teleprompter Settings: FloPrompter now “remembers” the teleprompter window’s size, location on the screen, zoom level, and scroll speed for each file. No more “one size fits all” approach to your teleprompter projects! This is an optional user setting, so press CTRL+J to select this feature in the Options Dialog.

(As an aside, this feature was requested by a guy from a karaoke band in California. He wanted this because each song they do obviously has a different beat, or scroll speed requirement. It’s cool to hear how folks are using FloPrompter in imaginative ways like this!)

• Tab Text Size: Now you can control how big the text is on the segment tabs. Right-click on a tab to display the context menu or click CTRL+J to show the Options Dialog. Before, the text size was hard-coded to 8 pt, but now you can set it anywhere from 8 - 24 pt.

• Minor Bug Fix: I changed the text color on the Options Dialog to black. For some reason, the text had previously been immune to detecting the currently active color schemes.

Upgrade Recommendation: If you wish. This is a “soft recommendation” to upgrade. Enhancements made to version 2.25 were all fairly minor or cosmetic, so most folks won’t notice the difference. If you decide to upgrade, this is, of course, a free upgrade for all FloPrompter customers! FloPrompter customers are always requested to download the latest version on the FloSpace Downloads page.

Many thanks to the customers (and potential customers) who requested these feature enhancements. As you can see, your comments are heard and result in direct improvements to the software!

Someone wrote to me the other day asking whether FloSpace FloPrompter is available with a special discount for academic institutions. The answer is most definitely yes!

The academic pricing is currently about 60% off for a single license. An even deeper discount is available for volume purchases. School media specialists, teachers, principals, and students are all eligible for the discount.

What’s cool is that the features are exactly the same as the regular, non-academic product. The only difference between the two versions is the price!

How would I use FloPrompter in a School?

The uses I’ve heard of so far include:

• School video production:  A school in one of the Carolinas has an in-school cable TV station. They use FloPrompter for producing their newscasts.
• Public Speaking Training: An education tech media consultant in Michigan said that she thought FloPrompter would be a great tool for helping to teach public speaking & presentation skills to elementary school students.

For more information on academic pricing, please call or write to me directly: FloSpace Contact Page.

I’ve recently begun work on the next release of FloPrompter, which is tentatively scheduled for mid-September. I’m tentatively calling this version 2.5 because it will have a completely overhauled content authoring window and a critical new feature in the teleprompter player. Here are highlights of what I’m working on right now:

• New Word Processor: The current version of the software uses a free text editor that is s-l-o-w and a little buggy. In FloPrompter version 1.0, the text editor was so bad that it sometimes crashed the program unexpectedly. So when I started working on version 2.0, I focused on making it, well, at least tolerable — and so that it wouldn’t crash the program. Now with version 2.5, I’m throwing away the old text editor and installing a brand new one! The new text editor comes from a different company which only makes word processing software. So it’s fast, flexible, and stable. The new processor will make it much easier to paste text in from other sources, including both web pages and Word documents. Changing the style from italics to bold will also be instantaneous rather than taking several seconds. Boy, I can’t wait to get this in!
• Mirrored Text in the Teleprompter Window: This is probably the most requested feature by customers and would-be customers. Traditional teleprompter hardware might show the text “mirrored” on a monitor, and then reflect that off a transparent screen, which is then read by the person speaking. Because the text is reflected off a screen, it will appear normal to the speaker. (Think of those swanky see-through teleprompter screens that you’ve seen the President use in some of his speeches.) I’m delighted to say that I’ve figured out how to make this feature work and we can expect to see it in version 2.5.
• Find & Replace: I have been working out how to implement the Find and Replace features within the new word processor. The new word processor comes with its own built in Find and Replace dialogs, but I’ve grown to dislike having a separate window open for these features (such as how Microsoft Word does it). So instead, I’ll be implementing these features using thin strips at the bottom of the Authoring Window, just like the Firefox web browser does. It’s so much nicer to be able to see and control the Find and Replace features from within the same window.
• Spell Check: Depending on how long it takes to implement the other features, version 2.5 may also have a new Spell Check feature. This feature will also require specialized software from a third party, so it will also be a bit expensive to pay for and bundle into FloPrompter. Still I think that any decent word processor really needs a built-in spell checker, don’t you?
• Spell-as-You-Type: Most people I know are lousy spellers. (God bless us all!) One of my favorite features in Microsoft Word is when it automatically underlines words that are mis-spelled, and then when you right-click on the word with your mouse, it will show you a little popup menu with a bunch of spelling suggestions. That’s a cool feature! Version 2.5 might ship with this feature, too! But fear not, if it doesn’t make it into 2.5, it is pretty likely to make it into 2.6.
• Remembering the old window size and location: One of my customers called me last week on my new FloSpace telephone number to make a personal plea for this feature (plus a few others). In short, when he launches FloPrompter, he wants the window to show up in the same size and location on the screen as the last time he used it. That sounds pretty reasonable to me, so I’ll be implementing this as a user configurable option — you’ll be able to have it open in the center of the screen every time like it does now or have it remember where it opened last time. The trick to implementing this feature is that some customers use FloPrompter in video production, where they’ll connect a second monitor to the computer and run the teleprompter there (say, under a video camera). So I’ll have to do some error checking to make sure that when the window launches it’s actually visible on screen and not off on a second monitor that might not be connected any more.
• Set a default file save location: This is another customer-requested feature. Right now, when you create a new FloPrompter document and click on “Save”, it’ll show you the contents of your My Documents folder first. After you’ve saved the document (say, to a folder called “Teleprompter Speeches”), it’ll offer to open or save files to the most recently used folder for the rest of the time FloPrompter is running. But once you exit FloPrompter, it resets to My Documents again. The customer says he always saves FloPrompter documents to the same folder so he’s requested the ability to set a user preference for the default folder instead of its being My Documents. That sounds pretty good to me, and it should be in the next release.

Should I buy FloPrompter now or wait until 2.5? Buy it now, please! First of all, you should buy it now because all version 2.xx upgrades are absolutely free for FloPrompter customers. Second, every purchase makes it easier for me to afford to buy the expensive software from third parties that I can bundle into FloPrompter (i.e., the new word processing and spell checking capabilities) to make it an even better product for you to enjoy.

As always, many thanks to the FloSpace customers who’ve written or called with feedback and suggestions! Please see the FloSpace contact page for more information on how you can contact me with your ideas.

A customer called me up this afternoon on my new FloSpace telephone number. He had a couple of great ideas for new features, which I’ll share with y’all later. One feature he asked me about had to do with controlling FloPrompter by using a foot pedal. Apparently, he’s in a karaoke band that plays music live while you sing to it (how cool is that?!), so of course he needs to keep his hands free for playing.

Does anyone know about using a foot pedal with desktop software? I never knew it was possible, though it sounds pretty cool.

The recently released FloPrompter version 2.2 now supports wireless remote presenters which control a PC’s  media keys (like play, pause/stop, volume up/down, next/previous) — even if the PC doesn’t have separate keys for these. So in theory, assuming a foot pedal can be set up to activate any of these media control keys or F keys, then it ought to work just fine with FloPrompter today. (Most teleprompter player control features have at least 3 sets of keyboard shortcuts for maximum usability.)

Anyway, if you have a foot pedal set up to control desktop software, please contact me and let’s test FloPrompter’s support for foot pedals. It sounds like a neat feature and it would be really cool to be able to say that we support them!

I’m pleased to announce that I published version 2.2 of FloSpace FloPrompter. For those in the know, my little software company is called FloSpace and my first product is a teleprompter that runs on PCs. (No Mac or Linux support right now. )

Version 2.2 features these significant enhancements:

• A new tag line! “Elegance Flows” The new tag line is featured in a few new places in the UI, such as the startup splash screen and About dialog. I wanted to select a tag line that incorporated the word “flow” in it to connote not only how the text smoothly flows up the teleprompter screen, but how using the software helps our customers become more elegant speakers.
• Remote Presenter Support: After several potential customers sent me emails asking whether the teleprompter player could be controlled with a wireless remote control (such as the type also used to control PowerPoint presentations), I decided to do some investigations. I purchased a remote presenter control from Keyspan and found out that almost all of the requested features already worked! The only features that didn’t work were speeding up and slowing down the scrolling on the teleprompter. So by hooking into the volume up, volume down, and mute keys, now all requested features are supported. A friend of mine who works at Nokia (my ex-employer, too) has the PSiLOC Wireless Presenter software for his Nokia E61i phone (a cool new phone!), so I’m hoping to do a quick test on that later, too.
• Copy & Paste Support for Segment Title Edits: Now when you double click on the tab page for a segment to activate the title editor, you can cut, copy, and paste text in the title editor. It’s a little feature, I know, but it’s nice to be able to do it finally.
• Bug Fix: Clicking on the Text Size in the Toolbar During Segment Title Edit Mode Caused a Fatal Crash: This was a nasty little bug that I hadn’t even thought about testing for. In short, when you double clicked on the tab page to edit a segment title, then clicked on the text size item in the toolbar, it caused the program to hang. Thankfully, a customer wrote me as soon as he (painfully) experienced this bug, which was one of the main reasons I released version 2.2 so soon. In a future version, I’ll put in support for changing the text size of the segment title tabs.

Upgrade Recommendation: Yes! Most upgrades are softly recommended. However, due to the new wireless presenter support and the fatal bug fix in particular, I highly recommend that FloPrompter customers upgrade to version 2.2. This is, of course, a free upgrade for all FloPrompter customers! FloPrompter customers can download the latest version on the FloSpace Downloads page.

Many thanks to the customers (and potential customers) who’ve written with feedback about Teleprompter. As you can see, your comments are heard and result in direct improvements to the software!

I’m pleased to announce the latest release of FloSpace FloPrompter, the most gorgeous and innovative teleprompter your PC will ever see!

Version 2.1 is a relatively minor upgrade to the software and includes:

• Microsoft Office 2007 UI License Tweaks: The gorgeous new look of the FloPrompter 2.xx software was inspired by the Office 2007 design style. What’s cool is that Microsoft allows third party vendors like FloSpace to license the design style for free. Yay! Of course, that free license does come with certain conditions… So I spent quite a bit of time going through several Microsoft documents and reading through the hundreds of licensing conditions trying to figure out what’s required, what’s optional — and where I needed to modify FloPrompter to be compliant. The good news is that there were only a few tweaks that needed to be made, so most folks won’t even notice.
• Bug Fixes: There were a few annoying little bugs that I squashed with this release. Thankfully, none of them were fatal. One of the bugs that were fixed involved one of the user settings which had not been used correctly.

Upgrade Recommendation: If you wish. This is a “soft recommendation” to upgrade. Enhancements made to version 2.1 were all fairly minor or cosmetic, so most folks won’t notice the difference. If you decide to upgrade, this is, of course, a free upgrade for all FloPrompter customers! FloPrompter customers are always requested to download the latest version on the FloSpace Downloads page.