Feature Preview: Slide Show Artisan

With the first preview release of SongShow Plus 8.5 we are introducing the new Slide Show Artisan slide show creation tool. 

The intent of Slide Show Artisan is to provide a new tool for building slide shows that can work within SongShow Plus, but also independently on both non-SongShow Plus Windows machines as well as Mac machines.

Slide shows built using Artisan on non-SongShow Plus machines will use SongShow Drive to upload content so that it can be retrieved from the projection machine, also through Drive.

The intent of Slide Show Artisan is to eventually replace the current Slide Show Assistants. The approach to designing Slide Show Artisan is different that previous SongShow Plus UI designs. Its design takes a more contemporary approach to UI/UIX with the intent of providing a smother and easier process.

It also uses a different approach to content creation than typical slide show creation tools in that content is kept separate from design and layout. We’ll see how well we can make that work.

When a slide show is created in Artisan, it is saved as an .ssart file in the SongShow Plus folder tree. This file can be presented directly from within the SongShow Plus Presenter Window. You can edit the file as usual using the Edit menu command which will then open Slide Show Artisan with the file ready for editing.

You can also open the file using Slide Show Builder. When you do this, the slide show is imported and converted to a SongShow Plus slide show format. At that point, you can make more specific alterations to the slide show. However, those changes will be saved in a new and separate regular .sspss file since Artisan doesn’t support all of the features that Slide Show Builder supports.

Artisan files will be full, first-class supported file formats within SongShow Plus, including support for Package-To-Go.

Slide Show Artisan, while distributed with the SongShow Plus installation, will also be available to be installed on its own on Windows and Mac machines. Because of this, there will often be times when a new version of Artisan is available that is independent of a new update to SongShow Plus. When this happens, a new version of Artisan will be automatically downloaded and used when Artisan is launched from within SongShow Plus.

This tool is in its early stage of development and only includes support for building a rudimentary photo slide show at this time. We encourage users to take a look as it evolves and offer some feedback along the way.

(BE311)

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