iSpring Technology
iSpring uses PowerPoint API for gathering information about presentation content and ActiveSWF technology for creating a Flash movie. iSpring collects information about each object in PowerPoint presentation, layout of slides and slide elements: shapes, texts, animation effects and embedded objects. Using these data iSpring creates Flash representation of each object in the generated Flash movie.
How does iSpring work in detail?
Data collection. iSpring examines presentation layout and content, carefully determines position, size and geometry of each shape. To arrange Flash shapes according to their animation settings iSpring captures information about PowerPoint animation effects and their combinations and create corresponding Flash animation sequences. The table below describes how iSpring handles each type of PowerPoint presentation objects.
| Objects | Conversion details | |
| Shapes | iSpring determines size, geometry, bounding box and position for each shape in the presentation. Using received data iSpring builds corresponding shape in Flash format. | |
| Texts | iSpring collects data about size, orientation, style, font and position of the text. iSpring also gathers information about effects influencing the visual text representation to create maximally faithful copy in Flash format. | |
| Animation Effects | iSpring collects information about effect type (fly, swivel, spin, etc), effect parameters (movement direction, rotation angle, color/transparency changes, etc) and effects timings. If several effects are applied to the same shape simultaneously, iSpring calculates superposition of their summary transformations and produces Flash animation sequences identical to PowerPoint's ones. | |
| Image | iSpring extracts image size, orientation, position on the slide and image content from PowerPoint presentation. Then iSpring compresses image according to user settings and embeds it into a Flash movie. | |
| Audio | iSpring extracts audio objects data from PowerPoint presentation, compresses it according to user-defined settings and then embeds into Flash movie. | |
| Video | iSpring converts embedded video into Flash format and embeds it into output Flash movie. Video to Flash conversion is a time consuming process and overall presentation conversion can take quite a long time. | |
| Flash | iSpring extracts embedded Flash objects from presentation, then embeds them into output Flash movie. As iSpring tests show about 99% of embedded Flash movies keep their correct behavior after conversion. These Flash movies can be loaded by standard Flash technology facilities such as loadMovie/attachMovie ActionScript calls. | |
Flash content generation. iSpring transforms shapes and effects data collected from PowerPoint into Flash movie content in ActiveSWF XML format. Then iSpring assembles this XML content into Flash movie.
Flash movie assembling. A Flash presentation can be assembled in two ways: as a solid Flash movie or as a set of separate Flash movies, one for each PowerPoint presentation slide. On this stage the Flash based player can be added if necessary. In the solid Flash movie mode the player is embedded for the entire presentation. When a presentation is published as a set of Flash movies the player, a separate Flash movie, is loaded for each slide individually.
Publishing. Flash movie can be published by iSpring either on the web server via FTP account or in a specified folder on a local computer, sent via e-mail or uploaded to SlideBoom online portal.
