Whether you work in an academic or in a professional setting, I think it’s safe to say that you’ve probably had to create a presentation before. Although, for many years, the presentation software scene was dominated by Microsoft’s PowerPoint, there are a lot of other tools out there that are becoming more and more popular as time goes by. You may have heard of Google Slides, for instance, which is a presentation software offered by Google, through their Google Drive. You may have also heard of Keynote, which is essentially Apple’s version of PowerPoint. It’s just as popular on Mac devices as PowerPoint is on Windows devices, and it’s just as functional, too. Another popular PowerPoint alternative that you may have heard of is Prezi, which does some pretty experimental stuff with the standard structure of a presentation. These are all examples of presentation software that is capable of competing with the more well-established PowerPoint.
In this article, I’m going to be talking about a presentation software called Focusky. Focusky is a presentation software that is specifically aimed at creating HTML5 presentations. (HTML5 presentations are great because they can essentially be played on any device. Compare to Flash presentations, which are not quite as universal in their applications.) I plan on talking a lot about Focusky in this article. I’ll go through some of its specific features, highlighting the ones that I think are most impressive. I’ll also be talking a little bit about how one would actually use this software. Finally, I plan to discuss whether or not I think that this software is actually worth your money. Hopefully by the end of this, you know a little bit more about Focusky and how it works. Without further ado, let’s jump right in.
Software Details
Price:Â Free, with upgrade options
Features:
- 3D Camera-style presentation support
- Multi-language support
- Hosted on a cloud-based platform
- Integration with Interaction Designer and Whiteboard Animation
- Presentations can be output as .html, .exe, .zip, .app, .mp4, or .pdf files.
- Fully compatible with the Focusky app
Before I get started, I should note that there’s no way I could possibly go over all of Focusky’s features. There are way too many, because this software covers way too much. However, you can expect pretty much all of the basics. You have support for numerous different transitions, animations, and multimedia integration. However, there are some standouts that I want to highlight. First of all, there’s the Focusky app, which allows you to watch, access, and present your presentation anytime and anywhere, both online and offline. I also want to draw attention to the encryption settings offered by this software, which are robust. Sometimes, you may be presenting something that contains sensitive or otherwise confidential information. These encryption settings make sure that you don’t have to worry about an unauthorized individual accessing your presentation. It’s great peace of mind.
Next, let’s consider how the pricing of this software breaks down. Although there is a free version of Focusky, it has less features than the paid version of the software. In the free version, you receive 10 GB of cloud storage and 50 uploads per month. You miss out on many key features, including the ability to publish to HD video, access to the template library, 3D backgrounds, the animation editor, vector resources, and a lot more. It’s a bare bones experience, but it’s definitely affordable. The standard version of Focusky costs $9.99 per month, and the professional version of Focusky costs $99 per year. If you wanted to go all out, you could also just buy the enterprise version for $399. There are quite a few differences between all of these versions, and I can’t really break it all down in just a paragraph. If you’re interested in purchasing some kind of Focusky license, then I encourage you to check out their pricing for yourself, and determine which version would work best for you given your unique needs.
How do you use Focusky?
Very often, when you use something like a presentation software, it can get really overwhelming, really fast. There are a lot of different options and menus to choose from, and so it’s easy to get lost in it all. Although Focusky is designed in a very intuitive and simple way, help is always good. I can give you a general run-down on how you would create a presentation with Focusky. First, you would want to select a background image and background color for your presentation. Then, you need to create a frame for your path. Think of this as like creating a blueprint for what the rest of your presentation is going to look like. Structure things appropriately. Once that’s done, you can fill out the presentation as you see appropriately. Here, you have the option to insert multimedia content, like videos, music, or images. You can even add animations, if you want.
Even if you’re not into all of that multimedia stuff, you can just insert the contents of the presentation at this stage. Get everything where you want it to be, because next, you’re going to be getting ready to publish this thing. You have the option of publishing the presentation to the cloud or publishing it offline. By publishing to the cloud, you’re basically saving the presentation in Focusky’s server. You configure things like path duration and video size, and then you just let it post. The user is also able to publish the presentation offline, which means you’ll receive a file that you can just download directly to your computer. The options in each of these menus depend on which output format you’ve selected, but you can expect to be able to adjust things like screen size, slide duration, and so on. And that’s about it! Although the sheer breadth of Focusky’s offerings may be intimidating at first, it isn’t really rocket science once you get your bearings.
Is Focusky worth it?
So with everything that we’ve just learned, is Focusky worth it? First, let’s evaluate that question based on the free version of Focusky. Although the free version lacks a lot of great features, I still think that it functions really well as a bare bones presentation software, and I would argue that it’s comparable to Prezi, which is a very popular presentation software. I think that it’s definitely worth your time, if that’s all that you’re putting into it. Once you start pouring money in, I don’t think that really changes. Focusky is very user-friendly, in a lot of different ways. Being able to output to multiple different file formats is really convenient. Could you convert across output formats yourself if you really wanted? Yeah, probably. But it wouldn’t be nearly as convenient as it is with Focusky. There’s also the fact that your license comes with all of these libraries full of resources like temples and vectors that you’re free to use in your presentations. All of these things save you a lot of work.
If you consider how much work you’re going to be putting in to create your presentation in the first place, I think that it’s pretty great to have something that helps you out as much as Focusky does. Plus, if you consider the pricing of this software, it’s priced pretty reasonably compared to its competitors. It’s not like you’re paying a lot more for all of the features and benefits that you’ve read about here. You’re paying about the same, and less in certain situations. In short, I think that Focusky is an easy to use, comprehensive, and secure presentation software that would prove useful to just about anyone who needs to create presentations on a regular basis. Even if you only create presentations every once in a while, this could still turn out to be a very useful tool for you. I highly recommend it, if you’re in the market for a new presentation software.
