Sessionfire Introduces Non-Linear Presentations

The Sessionfire team is proud to announce a new beta build that contains some amazing new features. For a quick overview take a look at the teaser:

The outstanding new feature of this build is: Non-Linear Presentations. You can directly visualize sections within your presentation. This gives and your audience a unique impression and overview of the structure of your talk. We added three different layout options for this - choose the one you like. Additionally you are able to decide on the path through your presentation while presenting. You can go straight through everything or dive into groups on demand.

The other big new feature is the customizable overview look of your presentation. In the past the layout you chose decided about the overview look. Now you can customize this overview setting for each presentations absolutely free. If you would like to show the tiling layout in a complete flat fashion, just do it.

We also improved the quality of the animations (much smoother now), added Drag&Drop to load presentations and fixed a screen cheese bug on Windows. Ah - one more thing, for our Linux fans: We have an experimental Linux build available... :-)

Go to downloads to get the free beta!

Sessionfire starts Public Beta

The days of the private alpha testing are over. Sessionfire starts with public beta testing, so everybody is welcome to download the latest build, try out the features, use it for your own presentations, and - most of all - give us feedback!

Following the idea of agile and incremental development, the current beta builds are far from feature complete. We try to build a very minimal presentation tool and therefore we exclude more features than we include. So don't be suprised when looking for a complete graphical editor without success. You don't need to throw away your old tool or your old presentations. We do less, but we do that in a simple and gorgeous way. Watch the introductory screencast.

Anyway, let us know what you think, what you are missing, what you like and what your wishes are for upcoming builds via Sessionfire on Uservoice. And we will try our very best to turn that into reality.

New alpha build out now, including new features

The new alpha build of Sessionfire is out now and includes a remarkable number of new and changed stuff. We are proud to provide you with this new build for testing. The changes include:

• New feature: You can save your settings for a presentation - and those settings are restored automatically when the presentation is loaded again.
• New feature: Control the exact scaling of focused shapes, allows you to zoom the shape you watch to fill the screen completely even zoom a little more or less.
• New feature: Control the space between shapes, allows you to avoid overlap between shapes in all settings.
• New feature: New "Go-To" animation for moving to the next shape without a visible animation.
• New feature: You can now enable and disable the reflection of the shapes.
• New feature: We added a timer that allows you to step through your shapes automatically. You can define the time each shape should be shown and start and stop the timer. This makes SessionFire the perfect tool for Pecha-Kucha style presentations.
• New feature: New button to start a presentation (full-screen mode) directly.
• New feature: New integrated help shows some explanations of the features from within the application.
• Circle layout now always produces a layout that fits on the screen.
• Splash screen integrated for fast startup feedback.
• On Mas OS X platforms Sessionfire can be quit using the default keystroke (Command-Q).
• New widget library used for improved look of central control panel.

Enjoy!

SessionFire starts alpha-testing

We are very proud to announce that Sessionfire started the alpha testing stage today. From now on Sessionfire will ship the latest builds continuously to selected alpha testers to get feedback and to improve the product. The goal is to improve the product and to announce a public beta as soon as possible.

The product development process is based on an agile approach and the idea of "Eat Your Own Dogfood": While the early alpha versions are still missing a lot of features of the planned product, its already usable in production and we are ourselves using it for all our own presentations and talks. And every new build will improve the product step by step and introduce new, most-needed features.

SessionFire on the iPhone

While I am busy working on SessionFire and pushing it towards some kind of very early alpha testing my colleague Matthias Lübken has implemented a first prototype of a remote control app for SessionFire on the iPhone. I am really enthusiastic seeing the prototypes he produced during the past weeks. You can preview shapes, walk through them using a coverflow-like animation and navigate through your presentation:
Its great to see and feel how smooth the graphics and the touch interface on the iPhone works!

Session Five is now SessionFire

Session-Five is now called SessionFire. The Blog is now located under sessionfire.com/blog. Please update your bookmarks!

More Details on Session Five

People wanted to know more about Session Five, so here are some more details and concepts of it:

• Session Five is a new kind of presentation tool. It runs as a rich-client application on top of Windows-32, Windows-64 and Mac OSX and can be used to show presentations that are different from those that are created with traditional presentation tools.
• Session Five is not based on the concept of slides. You need to forget about structuring your presentation as a set of slides. Instead you start to think about the plot you would like to tell and the elements you would like to visualize.
• Session Five gives you three basic concepts to create your presentation: Shapes, Animations and Layers.
• Shapes are the visual elements of your presentation (the elements). There are various kinds of shapes. They can be arranged in a 2D world.
  
• Animations can be defined between arbitrary shapes (the plot). There are various kinds of animations. They live in a 3D space.
  
• Layers: In addition to shapes and animations Layers can be used to define animation-independent elements (your logo, the date of your presentation, etc.).

Using these concepts Session Five gives you more of a video game feeling than watching boring slides... :-)