slideshows

Vuvox mashes up media with style, lives up to hype

Vuvox was one of the few services that wasn't quite ready for the public after showing off its wares at Demo 2007. Like Flektor, Good Widgets, RockYou, Slide, Mixercast, and other mashup services, Vuvox lets users pull in media content from the Web or a hard drive, and put that content together using a Web-based editor. The end result is something that's visually engaging and can be shared via e-mail, or embedded on blogs, Web sites, and social networking profiles. The service is officially opening its doors to everyone as of today.

Vuvox grabs your media in two places. The first is from Web services such as YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket, and Google. The other place is your hard drive. You can upload files one at a time, or in batches after installing Vuvox's small browser plug-in. Once you've added your media, it's a simple drag-and-drop process. You can reorder, combine, or delete pictures or video in a simple queue. When you're done creating, you can apply one of Vuvox's 11 different themes. Each is unique, and has various visual styles that enhance, or in some cases stylize, your media. You can also use some advanced editing tools, like a cropper and layer mask, to tweak your shots.

Once published, each user gets their own channel. Other users can come by and comment on slide shows, and then share the slide shows with others either by e-mail, embedded link, or a URL. The service also has a featured section, showing off some of the more popular, or notable, works by users.

Like most services these days, Vuvox also has a Facebook application. Similar to the full version of the site, you can grab content from Flickr and Picasa. Since it's Facebook, you're also able to pick photos from your Facebook albums. When finished, you have the option to share the content with friends, and post it to your profile. The only downside here is that the Vuvox editor has been tweaked slightly, both in size and features, to accommodate the Facebook crowd. The results look just as good, but the editing experience isn't nearly as enjoyable.

Is Vuvox worth using over the competition? It's pretty impressive for a new service, and quite polished. The one snag is that it can be a little slow, and you don't have a lot of control over the way some of the themes play with the presentation of your shots. If you're looking for a similar media mashup tool that offers stylization but also a little more user control, check out SplashCast (also a Demo 2007 launch) and Flektor (review).

For more screen shots of the interface and an example of the embedded application, click the Read More link below.

Photos: The Little Professor MP3 player

I've been threatening to make my own MP3 player for a few months now, but after meeting with a group called Teuthis at this year's Maker Faire, I finally caved in and bought the Daisy DIY MP3 player kit. I mean, how am I supposed to objectively rate MP3 players for CNET if I haven't made one myself?

So here's a 16-slide photo gallery of the whole construction--starting with the bare board and ending with the final product. There's also a little time-lapse video footage of the construction in this week's Crave vodcast.

The … Read more

Google's PowerPoint viewer goes live

Gmail users who get Microsoft PowerPoint attachments in their in-boxes can now view them without having PowerPoint installed on their machines. Google appears to have flipped the switch to allow this feature as of last night. We originally reported on this last month, although at that time it appeared that only a handful of accounts had access. This option now shows up on all accounts.

Also, somewhat related: today is the unofficial "Day without Google," a challenge that asks people to try doing their searches on alternate search engines outside of the "Big 5" which includes … Read more

Weekend Webware: Slidez photo slide shows

Slidez is a new photo slide show tool for showing off photos on blogs, Web sites, and social networking profiles. Slidez pulls double duty as a hosting service and presentation tool, allowing users to upload and organize their photo library online. It's not a substitute for photo-hosting services like Flickr, Photobucket, or Yahoo Photos, but its embeddable slide shows are good-looking, and easy to put together.

Basic photo management is kept simple with a batch uploader that allows you to select multiple photos from your hard drive. As a test batch I uploaded 20 shots without a problem. Your … Read more

Google Talk widget gets better

Google pushed out a nice update to the Web version of their Talk application earlier this week. Users can now have more than four conversations at once, embed Flickr slide shows into chat, and my personal favorite, pop out the chat list as its own window.

The Flickr slide show implementation is pretty slick, although I got a little confused trying to paste in the slide show URL, only to get a dead-end. Users need only paste in an album URL, and Google Talk will automatically convert it into a slide show for you. You can shuffle back-and-forth between photos, … Read more

SlideAware makes PowerPoint a Web 2.0 app

We're big fans of Web-based productivity apps here at Webware, but we also like tools that bring Web 2.0 features, such as easy collaboration and access from anywhere, to the apps we know and use already. Xcellery (see Xcellery review) does that for Excel, and a new app, SlideAware, does a similar thing for PowerPoint.

SlideAware has two components. First, there's a plug-in you add to your PowerPoint toolbar (it doesn't work for Office 2007 yet, so I couldn't test this component). The plug-in lets you zap your PowerPoint presentations directly to the SlideAware service. … Read more

VoiceThread: photos, voice, and forums

VoiceThread is a photo sharing tool that launched earlier this month. It lets users upload photos from their hard drive or Flickr, and add voice and text annotations to each slide. These 'VoiceBooks' can be embedded in blogs, Web sites, or MySpace profiles. Other users can comment on each slide, with up to 28 comments per picture. The service is selling itself as a voice forum tool.

The VoiceBook creation process is handled entirely within one window, without the need to refresh or hop pages. It's pretty user-friendly, and adding photos is incredibly easy. In just a few minutes, … Read more

Weekend Webware: Goodwidgets makes for snazzy photo sharing

You might have noticed on my Trillian Astra review earlier this week that I used a sliding image-gallery widget to showcase all of the screenshots. That sliding image widget came from the folks at Goodwidgets, a service that provides users with seven free widgets for photo sharing.

Once you've picked your favorite widget, you can upload photos from Flickr, Photobucket, 23 photo-sharing service, or your hard drive. From there, you have a few options to tweak, like color schemes and how big you want it. When you're done adding photos and getting it just the way you want … Read more

FlipTrack puts your slideshows to music

Video-sharing sites like YouTube, Grouper and Revver, are hugely popular because they let everyone around the world watch sleepy kittens, as well as to save favorite videos and leave snarky comments. Sites like JumpCut take the interactivity a step further with tools for creating your own videos from a variety of source materials. FlipTrack is a similar new service that lets you start with one of their prerecorded music tracks, add your own photos, tweak the special effects, and publish your creation to their Web site.

For creating videos from photos, FlipTrack works similarly to JumpCut, except that it requires … Read more