Presenter 7.0 on the horizon!

Hold onto your hats fellow Presenters!

Version 7.0 is on the horizon!

Here's a quick snapshot of the latest features and upgrades:

• Support for PowerPoint 2007 anims in both PPT and PPTX formats
• Video support beyond flv: you can import .avi, .mpeg and .mov clips and in turn, they can be embedded as an .flv on a slide
• Navigation restrictions: so that specific slides are displayed for a certain amount of time in your presentation without having to depend on either silence (as recorded or added using the Audio Editor) or setting the default 5.0 second wait time in the Presentation Settings
• Branching: With the new branching feature from the Slide Manager, you can direct movement through a presentation without having to hide slides in the PowerPoint environment!
• Upgraded Theme Editor: rather than having to open up a whole new window just to select different colors for your presentation, the new Theme Editor has the color controls build into the main screen
• Video Editor: This alone is going to be HUGE! From what I can see, taking it's cues from the FMR Editor available to Captivate, Presenter 7 now allows you to edit videos...including effects like fades!
• Quiz pane: In addition to the familiar Notes, Search, and Thumbnail panes, the new Quiz Pane allows you to navigate quizzes and surveys in one integrated panel
• Question pooling and shuffling: randomly select questions at ouput AND ensure that each learner has a unique quiz experience by shuffling the question order!

Don't know about you, but I'm itchin' to get my hands on this version! I can't even begin to tell you how important the ability to control the Presenter environment is, but that pales in comparison to the upgrade to Quizzing features. If the quiz pooling and question shuffling work as advertized, this is going to be a HUGE gain for Instructional Designers, SME's and learners alike.

The full run-down of features is listed on Adobe's site here: http://www.adobe.com/products/presenter/features/

As more information becomes available, I'll definitely report them here as well as on my forum at http://www.robrode.com/yabb/

Rob