I spend most of my time working with application development tools or application servers, which means that most of the products I review fall into one of these categories. In rare instances I get the chance to take a look at other productivity tools, and sometimes I even get to have fun doing it. XML-Journal recently gave me the opportunity to work with Digital Lava's HotFoot for PowerPoint product - and I had a ball.

Background
Digital Lava positions itself as a "Communications Application Service Provider," offering streaming audio and video tools for large corporations. Although the ASP market itself has only been around a short time, Digital Lava itself was founded in 1995, and is currently traded on the NASDAQ as "DGLV." The company has built up an impressive list of clients and partners, including Microsoft, Akamai, RealNetworks, Cisco Systems, Dell Computers, Siebel, KPMG, Prudential Insurance, Network Associates, Alcatel, and CompuCom.

Digital Lava provides products and services that allow you to produce rich-media applications for all types of deployment, including Internet, intranet, extranet, CD-ROM, DVD, and any combination. It's unique for an ASP because it offers commercial software as well as hosted services (like a traditional ASP). All of Digital Lava's products and services are geared toward providing integrated audio and video presentations - one of the key products in this mix is HotFoot for PowerPoint.

HotFoot
HotFoot for PowerPoint is packaged as a plug-in for PowerPoint. It allows you to record audio narrations for your PowerPoint presentations and then package these presentations for deployment to CD-ROM, DVD, or the Web. HotFoot compresses the resulting package into Microsoft's Media Player format and it runs without PowerPoint.

A trial version of HotFoot can be downloaded from Digital Lava's web site in the form of a 10MB self-extracting archive. Although the reviewer's kit I received included both a microphone and a CD-ROM, I chose to download the trial kit just to be sure I had the latest and greatest version. The installation itself is simple, and I had the product downloaded and installed in less than 10 minutes. Once you have HotFoot installed, it will appear as a menu choice within PowerPoint (see Figure 1). (HotFoot supports several versions of PowerPoint, but I used PowerPoint 2000 with the SR-1 patch installed.)

HotFoot's menu is simple to follow. The first step in the process is to set the recording level of your microphone. Through this interface you can make some test recordings that aren't associated with any of your slides. You can play them back through the speakers and see what your voice sounds like. I spent several minutes playing with the recording level and moved the microphone back and forth until I was happy with the results.

The next step in the process is to either open an existing PowerPoint presentation or create one from scratch. I chose to create a new presentation that matched the review of HotFoot itself (as shown in Figure 1). To record a narration for any slide, all you need to do is select "Narrate" in the HotFoot Menu. HotFoot displays a small panel within PowerPoint that allows you to record your narration. You're free to stop recording and replay the audio at any time, and you can rerecord the narration for any slide as many times as you wish. When you're finished, you can move to the next/previous slide, or jump out of the recording interface altogether.

While HotFoot is easy to use, it has some limitations. Although PowerPoint supports both slide animation and automatic page numbering, neither carries through to HotFoot. This won't be obvious when making your recordings, but it's well documented within the help file that accompanies HotFoot and will be obvious when you use the preview menu to test your presentation.

Those of you familiar with PowerPoint know you can create audio narrations with PowerPoint without a product like HotFoot. So, given the animation limitations and PowerPoint's own recording capabilities, you might question its value. In my opinion its biggest advantages are its packaging and deployment capabilities.

Packaging and Deployment Presentations
Although you can create narrations for each slide as you work, I found it easier to create my entire presentation and then use the HotFoot wizard to narrate and deploy it in one fell swoop. The wizard starts off by asking you to check the recording level of the microphone and then prompts you through each slide (see Figure 2).

HotFoot automatically synchronizes the audio with the slide transition (sans animation) and provides a four-second delay at the end of each audio clip. Once you've narrated each of the slides, the wizard gives you a choice of audio compression levels (see Table 1). HotFoot provides two levels of compression: one for "best sound quality" (less compression) and one for use with e-mail attachments (more compression).

I selected the "optimized for sound" compression size and entered a pathname and filename for my presentation. The HotFoot wizard then created a complete executable file of both my presentation and the audio narration. HotFoot encapsulates the PowerPoint slides into its own software, so it's not necessary to have the PowerPoint viewer installed to view the presentation.

I found the packaging function to be one of the best features of the product. It's simple to take the resulting executable and upload it to a web site or attach it to an e-mail. HotFoot provides a command center interface that allows the end user to view the presentation and skip forward or backward as desired. The HotFoot interface includes a listing of the slides in the presentation, an audio control function, and a panel for the actual slides (see Figure 3).

You'll notice some degradation in the sound quality due to the compression and the slides lose some resolution. To make it more legible, I'd recommend limiting the amount of small text and intricate graphics you use inside a HotFoot presentation.

Despite these limitations, I was highly impressed with the packaging capabilities of the product. You can view my narrated presentation on HotFoot from my web site at http://moxie.webdb-bible.com/kp/docs/xmldevj/xml-hotfoot.exe.

If you don't have the bandwidth to host presentations on your own site, the folks at Digital Lava provide a hosted version of HotFoot that you can use as a storage and display site. HotFoot Host allows you to organize presentations and provide security and password access in an ASP format. Digital Lava provides the front-end interface that manages all access to the uploaded content.

If you choose to host your applications on the web, you'll need to make sure your end users have at least version 6.1 of the Windows Media Player installed. HotFoot uses Media Player to show the presentation (although they don't need the PowerPoint Viewer installed on the client). I uploaded my presentation to my web site and then tested the download (you can actually test the presentation from within PowerPoint). I liked the interface and the audio coordinated nicely with the slides; however, the quality of the audio was only fair.

Summary
Overall I found HotFoot to be a great tool for narrating presentations and creating deployment packages for posting on the web. If you have the need to integrate audio, slides, and video, Digital Lava provides some additional services you might want to consider.