Impact Labs - PointLESS -- where did it go?

[Beverley]

Does anyone know what happened to PointLESS by Impact Labs? It seems the
company is gone, based the lack of a website at their old domain name. Did
anyone buy the rights to the product, or buy the company? Will there ever
be a new version of it?

I found another program (RnR PPTools Optimizer) that did a similar thing
(compress bloated PPT files) but it didn't do as good a job as the demo copy
I had of PointLESS.

Case in point... Original 9-slide PPT file 16,060 mb.
Manual remove & reinsert as jpgs: 568 kb.
PointLess demo set to output at 1024x768: 512 kb.
Optimizer demo set to web quality: 1,081 kb, and images are very lossy.
Optimizer demo set to output at 1024x768: 1,486 kb.

So three times the resulting file size for a comparable result. Much better
than the original size, but it could still be better!

If you know, either reply here or email me at (e-mail address removed).
It's my spam-bait email address, so please mention something about PointLESS
in the subject line so I read it!

Alternately, if you know of another program I could try, let me know and
I'll run it against the same presentation for a good comparison.

Thanks!
Beverley

 

[Echo S]

I noticed a few weeks ago that it had been bought out.

Hang on a sec...

Ah, yeah. Look here. http://tinyurl.com/7u7m6 Links to PointLESS,
Optimizer, and NXPowerLite.

The GalaxyVue main site only has its logo -- I can't find any product
listings or anything, so maybe PointLESS really is gone for good? Dunno.

 

[Sonia]

Death by product name! LOL!

--

Sonia Coleman
Microsoft PowerPoint MVP Team
Autorun Software, Templates and Tutorials
http://www.soniacoleman.com

I noticed a few weeks ago that it had been bought out.

Hang on a sec...

Ah, yeah. Look here. http://tinyurl.com/7u7m6 Links to PointLESS,
Optimizer, and NXPowerLite.

The GalaxyVue main site only has its logo -- I can't find any product
listings or anything, so maybe PointLESS really is gone for good? Dunno.

--
Echo [MS PPT MVP]
http://www.echosvoice.com

Does anyone know what happened to PointLESS by Impact Labs? It seems the
company is gone, based the lack of a website at their old domain name. Did
anyone buy the rights to the product, or buy the company? Will there ever
be a new version of it?

I found another program (RnR PPTools Optimizer) that did a similar thing
(compress bloated PPT files) but it didn't do as good a job as the demo copy
I had of PointLESS.

Case in point... Original 9-slide PPT file 16,060 mb.
Manual remove & reinsert as jpgs: 568 kb.
PointLess demo set to output at 1024x768: 512 kb.
Optimizer demo set to web quality: 1,081 kb, and images are very lossy.
Optimizer demo set to output at 1024x768: 1,486 kb.

So three times the resulting file size for a comparable result. Much better
than the original size, but it could still be better!

If you know, either reply here or email me at (e-mail address removed).
It's my spam-bait email address, so please mention something about PointLESS
in the subject line so I read it!

Alternately, if you know of another program I could try, let me know and
I'll run it against the same presentation for a good comparison.

Thanks!
Beverley

 

[Echo S]

heh. I wasn't gonna go there. <VBG>

--
Echo [MS PPT MVP]
http://www.echosvoice.com

Death by product name! LOL!

--

Sonia Coleman
Microsoft PowerPoint MVP Team
Autorun Software, Templates and Tutorials
http://www.soniacoleman.com

I noticed a few weeks ago that it had been bought out.

Hang on a sec...

Ah, yeah. Look here. http://tinyurl.com/7u7m6 Links to PointLESS,
Optimizer, and NXPowerLite.

The GalaxyVue main site only has its logo -- I can't find any product
listings or anything, so maybe PointLESS really is gone for good? Dunno.

--
Echo [MS PPT MVP]
http://www.echosvoice.com

Does anyone know what happened to PointLESS by Impact Labs? It seems the
company is gone, based the lack of a website at their old domain name. Did
anyone buy the rights to the product, or buy the company? Will there ever
be a new version of it?

I found another program (RnR PPTools Optimizer) that did a similar thing
(compress bloated PPT files) but it didn't do as good a job as the demo copy
I had of PointLESS.

Case in point... Original 9-slide PPT file 16,060 mb.
Manual remove & reinsert as jpgs: 568 kb.
PointLess demo set to output at 1024x768: 512 kb.
Optimizer demo set to web quality: 1,081 kb, and images are very lossy.
Optimizer demo set to output at 1024x768: 1,486 kb.

So three times the resulting file size for a comparable result. Much better
than the original size, but it could still be better!

If you know, either reply here or email me at (e-mail address removed).
It's my spam-bait email address, so please mention something about PointLESS
in the subject line so I read it!

Alternately, if you know of another program I could try, let me know and
I'll run it against the same presentation for a good comparison.

Thanks!
Beverley

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Each of these products seems to have strong and weak points.

PointLESS, as I recall, used a proprietary form of JPG compression which may
have had some effect on the size of the results.

We (Brian Reilly and I ... the perps <g>) are looking into adding a few more
jpg compression options to Optimizer along with other features that will
improve its compression (but can't promise any release date).

If you can narrow down the incompressible slide or slides to a bit smaller
presentation, I'd be happy to have a look at it. Email to steve at sign
pptools speck com works. Thanks!

 

[Beverley]

The "problem child" was a single image on one of the slides. It was an
embedded OLE object, I believe, that was actually a PNG file. Deleting that
file from the presentation and doing nothing else dropped it from nearly 17
mb to about 2 mb.

So I can't make much of a dent on that presentation without removing the one
that was causing the problem. If you have an FTP site I could send it to, I
could get it to you that way if you'd like to use it as a tester for a new
version. Or I could put it on our FTP site for you to pick up.

Thanks,
Beverley

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

The "problem child" was a single image on one of the slides. It was an
embedded OLE object, I believe, that was actually a PNG file. Deleting that
file from the presentation and doing nothing else dropped it from nearly 17
mb to about 2 mb.

So I can't make much of a dent on that presentation without removing the one
that was causing the problem. If you have an FTP site I could send it to, I
could get it to you that way if you'd like to use it as a tester for a new
version. Or I could put it on our FTP site for you to pick up.

I imagine putting it up on your site would be the least troublesome for you.
If you'd like to email me the ftp instrux, I'd be happy to go up and grab the
file. steve atsign pptools dot com

Thanks!