Impatica

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Impatica allows the delivery of PowerPoint (and Macromedia Director and video files) over the Internet (or Intranet). Impatica does not capture video, but you can incorporate video input (such as Camtasia or Screencam files) in the finished deliverable.

Technically, Impatica converts PowerPoint files into a time-based animation that can be displayed over the Web, without requiring add-ins (it runs on Netscape 2, Internet Explorer 3, and subsequent versions). It creates a proprietary format .imp file, along with a HTML file (which contains a Java applet that opens the .imp file).

Impatica effectively replicates PowerPoint: anything that you can do in PowerPoint will be supported by Impatica. However, there are a couple of things it cannot handle, most notably: But there are a couple of things it can't handle:

• Connectors or call-outs;
• Animated gifs;
• Transparent fills and gradient fills.

Animations (except animated gifs - see above), transitions, and so on, are retained.

Note that text is rendered as images. This guarantees that text is displayed as designed, but could potentially lead to blocky text. Impatica includes a text search facility, although this will only work on text in the narration.

You need to create any required narrative within PowerPoint - Impatica simply compresses the PowerPoint and packages it. It is possible to synchronize 'talking head' video with PowerPoint and scrolling narrative text.

You also need to insert your own navigation buttons to get from slide to slide. It does have an index down the side, which is useful and does aid navigation. It is also possible to jump to video demonstrations.

There are a number of different offerings, depending on what you are delivering. The main one (for training purposes) is the Presentations package. This includes the components necessary to convert PowerPoint and Director products.