Straight Outta Beta
For the last few weeks, Notist has been open for beta testing. Thanks to great feedback from all corners of the globe, we’ve made some solid improvements, trapped some bugs, and built up a solid list of features we’d all like to see added. We hope it’s been as much fun for you as it has been for us.
As we move out of this testing period, we’ve shifted those beta accounts into our new user free trial period. This is the same free trial of all the Pro features that you get when signup up for a new account from today.
The free trial gives 14 days to use the full set of features for free, unrestricted. After that, you can either subscribe to a Pro account or just drop down to the standard free tier. Either way, none of your content goes away. The free tier just has limited options for adding new content.
As mentioned, we’ve made lots of improvements and fixes during the beta.
What we’ve fixed
Thanks to all your help, we’ve made some major fixes and improvements to Notist over the last few weeks. Some of these include:
- Making some good steps forward in improving the accessibility of our interface (our work here is never done)
- Fixing/improving the embedding of multiple different external slidedeck sources (SlideShare, Slides.com, Google Slides, SlidingUnconcious etc)
- Adding screenshots of remotely hosted slide decks when one isn’t automatically available. This includes things like reveal.js decks you host yourself
- Seeing some of you add presentations with a video but no slides, we’ve adjusted for that to make the video the big page feature when that happens
- Feedback has helped us improve the usefulness of the data feeds that are available for profile, presentation and event pages
- Fixed a bunch of edge-cases with our PDF conversion process, thanks to all your weird and whacky files. We’ve also made improvements to get great image quality by default, without you needing to do any special exporting
… and lots more besides. The combination of direct feedback, and just seeing how you’ve put the site to use has been really beneficial in helping us to make sure the site gets better all the time.
What we’ve got planned
There are still features we’re working on, some with the aim of having them ready by the time your free trials end.
- Custom domains: we’ve been wrangling servers and SSL certificates to enable Pro users to point a custom domain at their presentations
- More slide editing options: Pro users will be able to replace any slide in a deck with a new slide, a video or a GIF. We’re also adding the ability to select a slide to use as the thumbnail
- Sharing presentations: we’re working on oEmbed endpoints so you can embed a presentation in something like a blog post or a social media post.
- Full data export: you can already get all your data as JSON, but we’re going to also product a simple download option to make it even more convenient
As you can see, there’s a lot coming and there’s even more that we still want to do. One way you can make that happen is by subscribing to a Pro account to support our work and give us the time to spend working on new features.
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