Mac PowerPCs affected

Flash 10.2+ is not supported on Mac PowerPC computers. Users with Mac PowerPCs will need to upgrade their systems or will no longer be able to use Vyew.

Possible work-around

For the more computer literate, there is an unofficial workaround to upgrade Mac PowerPCs to Adobe Flash 10.2 as outlined here.

You’ll need:

1. A PowerPC Mac running Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard, or 10.4 Server Unlimited License.
2. A copy of Pacifist for Mac (shareware).
3. The latest .dmg of Adobe Flash Player 10.2

To install:

1. Install Pacifist into your app folder.
2. Mount the Flash Player .dmg by double clicking.
3. Right click the Adobe Flash Player install file and select “Show Package Contents”.
4. Open the folder “Contents”.
5. Open the folder “Resources”.
6. Copy “Adobe Flash Player.pkg” to your desktop.
7. Right click the Flash Player.pkg.
8. Select “Open with…” “Pacifist”.
9. Click on the “Install” button in Pacifist.
10. Restart your computer.

• Comment Flags — Comments can now be marked with flags such as Todo, Done, Question and Important (Star)
  
  

• Fixed Copy/Pasting Multiple Media Objects — Now, after selecting multiple objects and pasting them, the newly pasted items do not lose selection so they are easier to position after pasting
• MP3 Player Fixed — This was the last item on our list of Vyew v3 features that needed integrating into v4. You can insert MP3 files into a Vyew Room from your computer or a URL online. Play the MP3 for everyone in your room, or set it to auto-play when a person arrives on that page.
  
• Page Bookmarks — Add bookmarks to special pages in your Vyew Room inside the Page Manager
  
• Easier Button Plugin — Do you know what the Vyew Button is for? You can add it to any of your pages to allow easy navigation within the Vyew Rooms. For example, when your visitors click a custom button they can be jumped to a specific page, a different Vyew Room, or a web page. You can insert a button by going to INSERT, then “Button” in the plugin section (may need to click “More” if you don’t see the plugins)
  
  

• Upload Multiple Documents Easily — Now you can upload multiple files or documents from your computer in one shot. After going to INSERT, From My Computer, simply select multiple files on your computer by holding down the CONTROL key while selecting (on the Mac, hold CMD key).
• Drag / Scroll — If you need to move media objects to a different are of the page that is not currently visible, just drag it to the edge of the screen and the screen will scroll.
• Comment Notifications — We released this feature a month ago, but we made it a little easier to use now. Firstly, the emails are a lot easier to read because we updated how the emails look:
  
  

  
  Second, clicking “Reply” now will open up that exact comment in the Vyew Room so you can reply directly in the Vyew Room.

• New Feature: Subscribe To Comments – When responding to a comment in a room, now you can get an email notification when someone else responds to it. Anyone else who comments on that thread also has the option of subscribing.
  
  

• Minor Bug Fixes – As some of you know, Vyew 4 is a complete re-write of the Vyew interface from the ground up. Since our initial Vyew 4 release, most of our time has been going into minor bug fixes and optimizations. The new Vyew platform gives us a big potential for a faster product. In the coming months we’ll be focusing on this area more.
• Faster Load Time – While there is still more work to do in this area, we’ve made a few changes which decreased the load time by about ~2 seconds.
• Fix: Uploading to multiple rooms – This feature was a little buggy in the past. We’ve worked on this to ensure the page counts are accurate in the Home tab, and uploads to 30 rooms at a time work consistently.
• Add: Multi-select in Page Manager – Use Shift-Click to select multiple pages to move or delete them all at once.
  
  

• Add: Multi-select objects in a room – Though we already had this in the old Vyew 3, we just added this into Vyew 4.
  

• Fix:Laggy Rooms – We identified a problem which caused random users in a room to experience a 3-5 second lag/delay time in the interface. It was related to our auto-saving feature, and has now been fixed.
• Fix: Scheduled Meeting Sync Mode – When scheduled meetings were set to sync mode, they were not actually switching to sync at the time of the meeting. (Fixed in v4.13, March 2011)
• Add: Keyboard Shortcuts (Hotkeys) – Use these shortcuts for better productivity in a Vyew Room.

Keyboard Shortcuts

• Control-RIGHT — Go to the next page
• Control-LEFT — Go to previous page
• Control + (plus) — Zoom In
• Control – (minus) — Zoom Out

Keyboard Shortcuts while an object is selected

• Control-UP — Layer object on top of others (after selecting the object)
• Control-DOWN — Layer object below others (after selecting the object)
• Control-X — Cut
• Control-C — Copy
• Control-V — Paste
• Delete — Delete selected object
• UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT — Nudge an object a little (when it’s selected)
• Shift-UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT — Move object a further distance (when it’s selected)

Things To Be Aware Of

• No Stamp Tool − The Stamp Tool has been discontinued in Vyew 4. The Mathematics Stamp Collection was replaced by the Equation Editor plugin. We are considering adding it in later, but it is not a priority. If you have a problem with this, let us know how important it is to you.
• No MP3 support − We have not yet implimented MP3′s into Vyew 4. We hope to get this out in the next month. If this is a deal breaker for you, then stick with v3. We will make another announcement when that is read.
  

How to Switch to Vyew 4

Go here to switch: http://vyew.com/switchversions

Is My Account Vyew 3 or Vyew 4? How Do I tell?

The link above will tell you.

What’s new in Vyew 4?

It’s been rebuilt from the ground up in the latest Flash Flex4 technology which means…

• Export to PDF/Print – Export your whole room to a PDF file for offline storage or printing.
• The interface is more responsive, faster, and more stable.
• Loading times will be faster. We will be working on optimizations heavily in the coming months.
• Simpler, easier to use interface.
• Secure – We’ve added more security to keep your content safe.
• Searching – Search for content within your rooms (located in the Home Tab, upper right corner)
• New Page Navigator with easier drag/drop rearranging of pages, and docking to the side like PowerPoint.

VyewBook’s are now called Rooms

When we first started Vyew, for some reason we thought of a cute idea to call our meeting rooms VyewBooks. We called them Books, because we wanted to distinguish our meeting rooms from other peoples meeting rooms which were not “asynchronous.” The concept of a book, was that the content was there, and always would be there. In the end, maybe it caused more confusion than it was worth, so now we’re going back to the generic term “Room.” So, from here on out, we’ll be referring to Vyew Rooms, not VyewBooks.

Eventually someone mentioned that it might be a WIFI interference issue. Since there were so many other homes around mine who all had wifi, the signals were bumping into each other.

The solution that worked for me, was to change my Wifi channel from the default of 6, to 11. If you are having this issue, try it out.

Go to your router administration, usually http://192.168.1.1 in your browser (some brands may vary). Look for Wireless Settings or Wireless Administration. Look for Channel, which will give you a selection of 1 to 11. Pick 1 or 11.

The above, is a temporary solution. Ideally we want Vyew to work in all types of scenarios, so we have some ideas to minimize the problem while in Vyew.

The no-frames version of Vyew is ready to roll out, and we will be doing so today (Friday March 4) on one of our servers. This change will be transparent to everyone, but for the weekend, a notice will appear at the top of the screen informing them of this change. In case any problems are experienced, please click the link to contact support as we will be monitoring your responses throughout the weekend.

Filed under: Random

I’ve been thinking a lot about Google Maps lately[1]. It’s hard to remember what we used to do before Google Maps (well, before Mapquest). All the new dimensions of the internet map era make life so interesting, like finding obscure off-highway dirtbike trails, that only locals know about.

There are still so many barriers this technology has yet to cross. I have a prediction to make. Bare with me here as I day dream a little bit…

Archiving

Google is archiving all satellite and road images as time goes on and will re-capture them every year (or in some time interval). Eventually they’ll deliver photo and video content of every house on every street of every city in the world at any given time of the 21st century.

Playback/Search through Time

By the time my one year old nephew grows up, he’ll be able to look back 50 years through the Google Map archives and walk down the streets he rode his bike to school on. He’ll “drive by” his childhood house, switch to satellite view, and zoom in to see his old Tonka trucks in the backyard (in HD ofcourse). Then he’ll fast forward through time and catch glimpses of his parents old mazda pulling in and out of the drive, he’ll freeze frame on a shot of someone getting out of the car, switch back to road view and see himself as a kid, maybe even his pet dog (he doesn’t have yet) jumping out of the back door.

Forget about their self-driving cars, Google has invented a time machine[2]. As people realize the implications of this product, the dates and times that the Google camera cars are scheduled to re-capture your neighborhood will be publicized and become an event like Valentines Day or July 4th. People will stand outside their houses each year to get themselves recorded into the International Human Archive Project (a subsidiary of Wikipedia).

It will be a day anticipated like the first day of summer – everyone will be in their finest fits looking their best, since this is how PeoplePedia will forever remember them for this year. They’ll write short diary messages in their phone, like tweets, which will be transmitted to the Google camera car as it passes by. The messages will be stored in the PeoplePedia time-capsule archive which will be layered over the virtual experience later.

A Global Time-Capsule

Remember how you were told stories of your grandma and maybe even your great grandma? Our grandkids, grandkids will be able to navigate their family tree back to the point of watching video of each of their ancestors standing in front of their homes. They’ll click back year by year and watch them getting younger and younger until their great, great, great grandparents appear.

The only thing that will suck, is that the footage will be this super grainy, 2-D, HD 1080p format, that hurts your eyes to even look at. :)

.

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Footnotes

[1] Actually my mom got me thinking about this when she was browsing around parts of Europe with Google Maps thinking about her travels from 30 years ago as a teenager.

[2] Well not exactly a time machine that transports your physically, but a re-living of past experiences at any point and time on the planet.

“Do only what is necessary to convey what is essential. Carefully eliminate elements that distract from the essential whole…. Clutter, bulk and erudition confuse perception…, whereas simplicity allows clear and direct attention.” −Richard Powell

In my last post, I mentioned the “elevator pitch” test, in which you practice speaking your presentation to a friend in 45 seconds. This important exercise forces you to boil down all your crazy, rambling ideas to the bare essentials.

Including too much information in a presentation is like underlining everything on a page. If everything is important, than nothing is important. If everything is a priority than nothing is a priority. You must be ruthless in your efforts to simplify, but not dumb down, the message to its absolute core. [1]

They haven’t heard a thing you’ve said

With a hundred things fighting for attention throughout a persons day, you’d be lucky if your audience remembered one thing from your 10 minute presentation. What do you want that one thing to be? What is the absolute smallest granule of knowledge that you want to impart to your audience? That is your core message.

In their book, “Made to Stick,” the Heath brothers explore what makes messages sticky and memorable. They say the biggest obstacle to “sticky” messages is the Curse of Knowledge:

“The Curse of Knowledge is the condition whereby the deliverer of the message cannot imagine what it’s like not to possess his level of background knowledge on the topic. When he speaks in abstractions to the audience, it makes perfect sense to him, but to him alone.” [2]

Our love/hate relationship with simplicity

As the world becomes more complex, people crave simplicity. They love it. The iPod won because it was simple. Simple is good, simple is easy, simple is viral. Complex messages are hard to understand, and are hard to tell a friend. Simple ideas become viral because they’re easy to recall, explain, and relate to.

But we also hate simplicity. Simple ideas can be mistaken as shallow, dumb, and lazy. You don’t want to appear dumb and lazy do you? Then you better beef up your PowerPoint with more facts and figures. Why do so many product feature lists say “and much more” at the end? When in doubt, add more and say more, right? But this just dilutes the core message.

Disclaimer: I am the same person who is in charge of our website, and as I write this I do realize I need to take some of this advice to heart. Our current website is a little complex and requires simplification.

Learn to love simplicity through restraint

Lately I have been experimenting with a time management system called the Pomodoro technique. I’m working in strict 25 minute blocks with mandatory 5 minute breaks in between. The idea is that the mind is kept from multi-task fatigue by active rejection of interruptions and laser focus on a single task until the pomodoro timer rings. I’ve found the result to be greater efficiency and more awareness of where my time is going through out the day.

The reason this system works is because of the constraints. “In the field of design there is the belief that with more constraints, better solutions are revealed.” [3] Professional designers live with hundreds of constraints on a daily basis, because that’s how the design world works. Nondesigners, on the other hand, can easily get frustrated or go overboard with all the various options, effects, colors, and templates afforded to them by modern presentation software.

The solution is to impose strict restraints on your presentation and stick to them. This will help creativity and simplicity. For example, in 2003 a presentation style emerged from Japan called Pecha Kucha. You are allowed 20 slides which display for 20 seconds on an auto-rotation timer. That’s 6 minutes and 40 seconds to give a presentation and that’s it. It has become a global phenomenon in 80 cities, and is great practice for honing your presentation skills. [4]

Restraint means focus

In summation, use the elevator technique to find your core message. Then continuously reevaluate your entire presentation based on the core message. Does this awesome slide I worked so hard on, full of facts and figures strongly contribute to my core message? If the answer is not an immediately YES, then get rid of it. The simpler and clearer your message, the higher probability your audience will remember something.

Notes/Credits

This article was inspired by an awesome book:
Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds. It’s highly recommended!

• [1] Page 77 – “If everything is important, nothing is important.” I love this line.
• [2] Page 76 – I suffer from this disease frequently. When I’m working on a project for too long, I lose perspective on it. The six principles of “SUCCESs” help fight this disease: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions and Stories. Learn more.
• [3] Page 39 – We all hate restrictions, but perhaps we can learn how to use them for our benefit.
• [4] Learn more about Pecha Kucha here: http://www.pecha-kucha.org. I haven’t tried this yet, but I’m eager to on my next presentation.

Photo Credits: Ogimoki, Erato

You can start editing a scheduled meeting, adding more attendees or changing the meeting time, 2 ways:

1. In the Home tab, in My Meetings at the lower left, click on the meeting.

2. In the room, click on Invite, then See who has access…

   …then in the invitation list, click the Edit icon for the meeting.
   

Editing the Scheduled Meeting

Adding Invitations to the Meeting

The Invitation Wizard will show a list of all the currently invited people. To add people, type in their email addresses, comma separated. Click Next.

Changing the Meeting Time

Here, you can edit the scheduled meeting time. Click Next.

In the final screen, clicking FINISH will save the scheduled meeting information and re-email everyone who was scheduled to attend.

Deleting Invitations

See here.