Whip it out and wow them: make a teensy slide presentation on your phone with Stitch
Remember elementary school, when you learned how to make visual aids for your oral reports and so on? And then came the kids and their reports (by which time you were a pro). I don’t know about you, but I often still need them. People — from relatives to investors — are always asking me to explain one project or another that I’m working on. I always have my sites saved as icons on my phone, so at least I can open them with a single tap and use them as visuals while I narrate. But not all of my projects are online yet…
So I decided to play with Stitch, which you can use to make an adorable teensy weensy slide show in your phone. (I think I’ll make a presentation to convince my husband we need a Hawaiian vacation next year…)
Pick a presentation template or a blank slide. You’re then forced to choose an “effect.” These offer a variety of (rather tacky) text animations and transitions. Unfortunately, they also come with crap music. There are a couple of effects you can buy for 99 cents each. (Which I might do if one of them included silence.) If you want to change your effect later, tap Stitches on the bottom left of the presentation’s main screen (fifth image below).
The few editing tools are easy to understand and use. On the left of each slide, you have text color (but no pink), background color (but no pink), and text alignment. On the right you have a plus sign to add a text box, an undo icon, and a trash, which deletes the work you’ve done on the slide.
At the top, you can choose a background image from your phone, Instagram (random other people’s Instagrams…), or the web (I Googled “Hawaii,” and went straight to images). You can shrink and enlarge the images with a pinch/unpinch, but you can’t make them any narrower than the width of the slide. Which makes sense cuz they’d be too small to see. It is a micro-presentation, after all.
When you’re done, tap Finished on the presentation’s main screen to “stitch” your slides together. The app turns the slides, transitions and (sadly) sound into a movie file that’s saved to your camera roll. From there, you can share your micro-presentation video in the usual ways: e-mail, message and YouTube. With the free version, your movie opens with the Stitch “watermark.” You can buy the pro version for $4.99, which includes those for-pay effects and gets rid of the watermark.
The app takes a little getting used to, but it’s not rocket science by any stretch. If you have a good reason for making a micro-presentation, it could be well worth the effort.
Just remember, when you’re playing back the video to somebody, turn the sound on your ringer all the way down…
Devices: iOS
Cost: Free (pro version $4.99)
Stitch on the App Store
