Announcing Reel
Ready for something awesome? We're excited to announce the release of Reel, a little app from ZURB that helps you cast your ideas, poll your friends and reel in the feedback. No software or logins needed.
What is Reel?
Reel is a lightweight application for turning your images, powerpoints, or PDFs into mobile-friendly online slideshows, gathering opinions from friends or coworkers and creating report pages summarizing their feedback. Heck, you can even embed your Reel preso into your blog or website. Here's an example of a volunteer packet we put together for ZURBwired 2011, our 24-hour design marathon for local nonprofit Rebekah Children's Services:
Want to know more about Reel? Well, there's a preso for that!
Why Did We Create Reel?
The online presentation tools out there aren't great right now. They're either too clunky, require special software, logins, accounts or too much overhead. With Reel, getting your ideas out there and polling your audience is like shooting fish in a barrel. Just cast out your line of slides and they'll bite in no time!
What's Nerdy and Awesome About Reel?
We've baked some exciting technology into Reel to help make this app as fun and easy to use as possible. We've used our code framework, Foundation, to help Reel work well on desktop, tablet, and smartphone browsers, and plenty of JQuery and AJAX to keep the interactions fluid and intuitive. We also used Uploadify to allow multi-file upload and those dynamic thumbnails you see on the home screen.
On the back end, we use docsplit to process PPT, PDF, and DOC files, Paperclip to store images on S3, and Delayed Job and God (the process monitor, not the deity) to make sure everything stays on track.
Start Reeling '