About the New Prezi Viewer for iPad
Here it is! We just released a major upgrade to our Prezi Viewer ipad app. We've been working hard to make it better. In this post I'd like to share some perspectives behind the design. We improved the showing experience – letting focus on your content more than ever and, even though this version is still a Viewer, we added the ability to revise and retouch your prezis on-the-go.
New position for the navigation arrows.
Probably the first thing you'll notice is that we changed the position of the arrows (if you have a path). We decided to put them on the side of your canvas so that it's much easier to hold your iPad with two hands and use your thumbs to navigate back and forth comfortably. Better ergonomy = more control.
A brand new Show mode.
Our goal here was to remove everything to let you (and your audience) focus on your content while presenting. No menus, no buttons and very simple gestures to drive your presentation, so you can concentrate on your presentation, not on the controls.
If you have an iPad 2, you can connect it to a projector and impress your audience using Prezi Viewer for iPad. You'll quickly feel how better is a multitouch display to present your prezis rather than a mouse! And with tap anywhere on the screen to go next (see below), presenting has never been so easy.
You won't have to look for that tiny button again.
If you have a path, then you can just tap anywhere (except on the left edge) on the screen to go to the next path step of your prezi. So now you can keep looking at your audience while navigating. To go back just tap on the left side of the screen (you'll have a visual feedback to confirm that you went back, just to avoid confusion). But because we're Prezi, we know that great presentations are not necessarily linear so you can zoom out, pan freely at anytime. If you need to zoom to an object, just double-tap on it (remember a single tap anywhere will go to the next path step).
So basically the only new thing to learn here is that you need to double-tap on any object to zoom to it. For the sake of consistency this is now the standard behavior throughout the entire app. We got used to it pretty quickly, so we're confident that you will too :)
Revise and retouch your prezis on-the-go.
We all love to travel with our iPad, it's light and fit easily in the bag. Presenting your prezis from iPad is great too, but we know that sometimes we find a typo or would like to make a last minute change.. and (until now) we couldn't do it on our beloved iPad so we had to bring your computer too...
Icing on the cake, you can retouch your prezis on iPad! Even though we have only limited editing features at the moment we believe this is a great help and would actually let you leave your computer home in many cases. So you can now edit any existing text and transform (drag, scale & rotate) any object on your canvas :) See it as an "augmented" Viewer app.
We reduced the use of menus and buttons to the minimum and leveraged the multitouch capabilities of your iPad to provide the more intuitive experience possible. It was a great challenge to let you manipulate both the canvas and the objects with almost no interface elements, check it for yourself, it feels unbelievably easy!
Try it for yourself, but we believe that Prezi and iPad were born to be together, using Prezi never felt so natural. We're really looking forward for more amazing things in the future, stay tuned ;)
Cheers, from your Prezi design team.
Thanks to David Udvardy for the photos in this post.