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Starting on Saturday, Sept. 13, we are changing how we offer our product - there will only be one version of Flypaper. We will no longer have a free version and a Pro version. Flypaper will include a free 30-day trial of all features and we will offer monthly or annual subscriptions.

I describe the change in this video and there is more information here.

Pat

Several subscribers have asked: "How come Flypaper only offers support through e-mail?"

As we are a growing company,  e-mail support is the most efficient way for you to get the answers you need quickly. When you send a support e-mail, we automatically get some general information about the version of your operating system, your browser, and your IP address. With an e-mail you don't have to look up all that information and then find a way to get it to us.

Once an e-mail comes to us we respond quickly. If we don't immediately know the answer, we can check to see if the Flypaper application sent information about the error back to our servers. In most cases, it will tell us what went wrong and that really helps us find the solution. Once we have the solution, we send an e-mail back to you and you have a written record.

In most cases during business hours (8 a.m. -5 p.m. AZ) we find the answers and respond to the e-mail in two hours or so (usually faster).  Issues that come in outside business hours we usually respond to in 6-12 hours.  Some issues are more difficult and take a little more time for us to research, but we rarely take a full 24 hours to respond. Our policy is we will respond within 24 hours or the next business day. Flypaper Pro subscribers get priority.

We think the e-mail support is an efficient and effective way to get the information we need from you and give you our best answer without having to guess or use trial and error to find a solution. And e-mail takes the least amount of your time.

That's why we use e-mail to handle your support questions.

A good friend, Francine Hardaway, forwarded some comments and question about Flypaper that were on a social networking site called FriendFeed that I am not a member of. So I sent her the following to answer the questions: “why is Flypaper a Windows application that you have to download?” and “why don't you have a Mac version now?”

It is a Windows app because the app was targeted for business pro’s who either create or buy Flash programs especially for sales and marketing. Windows is by far the platform of choice for these people. We do have demand for a Mac version especially from graphic artists. The breakthrough with the Flash stuff we create is that mere mortals can now create, edit and customize real Flash programs. Flash programmers, graphic artists, web developers, etc. can also deliver really cool Flash stuff but now deliver in a way their customers can edit themselves instead of having to go back to the programmer to maintain it. Both the customer and developer wins because usually the programmer hates maintenance. They love to create.

It is a “download” because it has to process heavy graphics using lots of processing power. The king of web apps, Google, has big downloads for programs like Sketchup, Google Earth, Picassa etc. iTunes is also a big download. Keynote and ppt would be large downloads if they were not already on the machine when you bought it. Imagine millions of users trying to simultaneously create, edit and share large graphical presentations, or what we call “interactive stories”, using cloud computing power.

I have tried all the web based apps doing anything in the Flash arena. While I can get to the app very quickly, if I upload a song from my iTunes it takes several minutes to do. Videos, pictures etc. are even more painful. And all these apps are just now in either private beta, with a few in public beta. All are struggling with performance with only a few hundred users. iTunes, Picassa, Earth, Sketchup, Keynote etc. are all extremely fast and have millions of users. So the bother of an upfront download is made up 100x every time you use it. There are very simple graphics products like Slide where all you’re doing is adding some glitz and glitter to a pix and then posting it somewhere. That works. But anything significant combining text, video, pictures, recorded narration, animations, existing swf’s, Flash components in one story is very painful. Especially as thousands/millions of users are trying to do it at the same time. Every Flypaper story created though runs anywhere on the web requiring nothing but Flash on the computer which everyone has.

Also, it is key to understand Flypaper is best used to create “Interactive Stories that Sell” – on the web. The best use for ANY presentation building app is to create slides that support what I am going to say in a presentation. Flypaper is best to create and share stories that tell themselves 24/7 on the web. You can use it for presentations, but interactive stories are what it is all about. And with the Pro version (coming next week) you can now track everything about what a viewer of your story is doing with it. And the viewer can communicate with you in a variety of ways using our Flash components.

It does take a little bit of work and time to “get” what you can do with Flypaper as it is NOT a simple application. With power, there is always a tradeoff with simplicity. I had to play around a lot with some of the google apps mentioned above to figure those out as well. And iTunes can get really hairy especially when you are trying to get around the DRM elements so I can get stuff off one iPod to another iTunes. (I know you are not supposed to do that but most of the time I am doing it with stuff I own but are on different iPods or computers.) Plus you have to create an account to do anything in their store etc. You have to create an account with almost ANY of the online apps as well.

We are always trying to make Flypaper easier to learn. In the beta we did a really good job of “hiding” the great tutorials we have. Next week's launch of the general release and the pro version you can now readily find those tutorials under Help. So that should help.

So far, though, we have been amazed at the stuff people are already doing with our beta version and are very pleased with number of downloads.

Hope this helps with the questions and comments here. Perhaps this shows there is some method to our madness. Since I have been doing software for a long time I have learned there are always tradeoffs no matter what you do. All you can do is try to do a great job for your ultimate target market.

If you haven't found it yet, we have added a bunch of cool things you can do with text.  My personal favorite is "The Big Text Mask." To Flash people, it means you can mask any image with a line of text. What it means to regular people is you can "fill your text" with any picture.  It's easier to understand when you see it, than it is for me to describe it. But masking is the kind of effect you see all the time on TV and in Flash animations on the Web.  We have made Big Text Mask really easy to do in Beta II. 

We have also added scrolling text, text art, the ability to set text on fire and more text effects. Check out some examples in the short Story below:

In Beta II we completely reworked the User Interface (UI). We adopted Window's standard controls and changed the background gradients to match your Window's theme. We also worked hard to make it easier to control the content on your page, share your Story with the world, and access your account on flypaper.net.

For a lightening fast pass at the changes, start the short Story below:

It's been one of the most frequently requested features, and finally we have the ability to convert a PowerPoint file into a Flypaper Story. Someday over coffee, I can tell you about the wrong turns we took in trying to convert PowerPoint to a swf and then bring into Flypaper, but that's old news.

Now you can convert text, audio and video from PowerPoint straight to Flypaper. Everything else comes in as a graphic.  Play this fast demo to see how it's done and what it does and what it does not do...

Flypaper Beta II has an all new way to share any content you have created. We've made it much easier to put your Stories on the Flypaper Community, and quickly embed it on any other Web page. You can share from the Flypaper application with the Share button, or share any Story through the new FlyPlayer.

Check out this quick demo to see how it's done... 

What’s a Flybrary? It’s the Flypaper Library. It has a unique name because we couldn’t find anything else exactly like it. Applications like Flash have libraries where you can store all the media you import, but the Flybrary does much more. It connects you to the rest of the world – to search Google, Yahoo and Flicker for images, YouTube for videos, and the Flypaper Community for Templates and Stories.

Why not just call it “Search?” Because the Flybrary is more than just search. It also stores all the media you have used in Flypaper before. Say you build a Story on Monday with 10 new pictures from your product catalogue. On Friday, you open Flypaper and start working on a pricing campaign story – you wish you had all those product pictures, but you can’t remember who sent them to you or where you found them. Just open the Flybrary and all of the pictures you used on Monday are there for you to re-use. The Flybrary stores all the media files on your local computer and gives you a quick search to retrieve them all.

What’s next for the Flybrary? We are working on making it even faster and easier to use. We want to be able to create options for viewing files by name, or seeing a list of folders. We’ve already gotten feedback that users need the option to turn on/off the way files are stored locally, and some users want to be able to search multiple local or network folders at once. We really want to hear from you. Leave a comment below to let us know what you think of the Flybrary.

Hello! Welcome to our new website and our blog. This goes along with the new Beta II version of Flypaper that we just posted for everyone to download and use. A lot of you shared with us cool ways you’re using Flypaper for business and personal use. Your feedback helped us build a vision for Beta II and beyond. What you’ve said, and we’ve heard, is that Flypaper is the first application to really let you -- the marketer, the salesperson, the training professional, the student – create presentations and high-end content that sells your story.

Another thing for Flypaper users - we used to call the saved pages "Models." Now we call them "Templates." Flypaper Templates are so much more powerful and dynamic than traditional templates, but we found Templates was just an easier term for everyone to understand. We still have a little fun with words with our new "Flybrary," which makes it much easier to find all those Templates, media files and Stories on your computer and on the Web. Now you can just drag and drop into your presentation, which is really cool.

This next version is meant to make it even easier to create, edit and share the content you create that sells your business, your ideas, yourself. And we’re excited to say that we’re already cooking up the next release, a Flypaper Pro version for later this year.

One more cool thing - our home on the Web is now officially www.flypaper.com! Enjoy the new Beta II version, and let us know what you think.