Yesterday I wrote about a "beta" test of Flowgram ...
Today I would like to report that there is a reason why these types of nifty programs are beta tested. Of course I was fascinated with the opportunities this program represented, and they still exist, just a few "bugs" need to be worked out first...
After I uploaded my first Flowgram iBusinessLogic Web Development Projects 2008
admittedly late in the night, when I should not have been working... I tried to get fancy by using some of the other interesting capabilities of the Flowgram service.
Flowgram has a connection with Flickr , which in therory allows the user to insert photos and graphics from Flickr into any Flowgram at any point in the slideshow. Wow, what a great time saver, since I already use Flickr it was something I really wanted to try.
I should have started a new Flowgram presentation to try this feature.
Apparently the developers at Flowgram have not figured out that Flickr allows the organization of photos into sets. When I used the Flowgram interface to navigate to one of my images in Flickr I simply selected the set of photos I wanted to find the individual picture within. Flowgram decided I wanted to upload all of the photos in that particular set (over 160 images) to my already finished presentation.
Before I realized what was happening, Flowgram had imported over 90 of those images to the presentation. This would not have been a serious problem, had I been able to delete these new slides created by the program from my Flickr images... Unfortunately, the number of graphics imported was too much for the web based interface of Flowgram, and the program would not allow me any access to these new slides. I could tell they were there, but I could not remove them, move them or do anything with them.
This was a problem, since the presentation was live on this blog and in other places.
The images were not private or racy but they just did not fit in with my presentation. I could not delete the entire Flowgram because I had spent a considerable amount of time recording narrations for each slide I did want presented.
I apologize to anyone who viewed the test Flowgram I created and came to the end only to find numerous images which did not fit in. The presentation has been corrected now (by simple luck and trying 4 different browsers), so the odd images are now removed.
My voice is still there, (if thats a good thing) and the images of our current projects are still there... (Although some do not display correctly now, and to change an image after audio has been recorded, one must also re-create the audio after the new screenshot slide has been created). Some way should be devised to keep the audio and images saved as seperate files so new images could be inserted under the same audio.
Needless to say, this is a free beta test for me, and I find the idea of the Flowgram service fascinating and possibly very useful for business and web use. But without fixing these issues, or allowing a way to save versions of a presentation without over writing the whole thing, it may be an iffy proposition to use this on a daily basis.
When the beta test is complete, I am sure the program will be much improved.
Our friend and co- blogger Richard Brewer Hay, over at eBay Ink 
