Carl Tyler's Blog

1 - I used the Standalone version of Symphony 1.2 on Windows only

Over all I did not have any performance issues, but I do think the product needs a little work

I had some minor issues of screens reformatting slightly when being added in to a presentation from another file. And also had trouble getting text boxes properly styled as it was less then intuitive.

I did attend one of the sessions they held on Symphony for speakers, without that I really would have been lost, as some features are hard to find.

Overall it was not too bad, but the product definitely needs some work in the usability area.

2 - I am using Symphony 1.2 on linux I had no problems. Certainly Symphony is still catching up to OpenOffice, but the provided functionality is more than I need.

My biggest problem was changing over some older slides to match, or heck, be visible! in the Lotusphere color scheme

3 - Here is a cautionary tale. I have seen *significant* differences in the formatting of ODP presentation files between Symphony and OpenOffice.org 3.0. At first I thought the ODP was just a quick conversion of a PPT file but later found it was a native file from Symphony and it rendered very differently (unusable for anything more than personal reference material). It would be wise, regardless of what software you use to create your presentations, that you (1) review it using the version of Symphony they recommend for the conference; and (2) if at all possible, do your own conversion to PDF and supply that as well.

4 - I haven't had any performance problems on windows xp. The issues I had were:

- I have to convert any pasted images to bitmap, otherwise they are formatted improperly (right click->convert->bitmap)
- I decided to add a gold color to my palette for all my callouts and arrows. When viewing on a different PC it discarded the color and selected yellow. So I felt I need to stick with a color in the default color palette. I had to redo all the slides...

John

5 - I used the 1.2 on XP with 2 gb of ram and had zero problems. No crashes, no freezes. The performance was just fine. The first couple of hours were frustrating because it was unfamiliar, but that is to be expected. I didn't try anything extreme because of the time constraints. I thought it was totally usable. I even got into the quick keys.
- Andy

6 - Carl,

I am the product manager for Lotus Symphony. Sorry to read about your problems. Would you let me know what version of Symphony you were using on Windows. Our Mac version is still in Beta and we are working on improving performance. I am a bit surprised on the crashes and lockups you mention on Windows. I do not experience them at all running the 1.2 code. There are some performance options under File- Preferences ... the click on Lotus Symphony. For your configuration you check the enable performance optimization and the click the High radio button ... This will help with load time and save time.

If you have any dumps or traces from the crashes .. Please send them to me and we can investigate.

You may also want to visit our website for tips and access to our support forums. { Link }

Let me know if I can be of any help with your presentation ...

7 - In the main I used a late 2007 Macbook with 4Gb RAM, OSX 10.5.5. I used Symphony stand alone (MAC and Windows) to prepare two presentations and up to 250 slides (not all of them were included but some made it to the back of the decks for reference)

I had one major crash (MAC) and the autosave/recovery stuff saved my bacon.

There were a few usability issues. Things I wanted to do like embed video, put borders around images and couldn't. Maybe Symphony can do that stuff but I couldn't work it out (the MAC allows you to drag and drop video). Sometimes odd things happened like bullets disapeared.

I found myself comparing the experience with Keynote. iWork is pretty cheap & Symphony is free. Even taking the cost into account Keynote wins hands down. It's more capable and more intuitive.

Curiously I liked OpenOffice 3.0 less than Symphony (prob. because I'd got used to the latter by then).

Hopefully Symphony will get better with time but as long as I have a MAC Keynote will be the one for me.

8 - I could not afford the risk or downtime, so I did the whole think in PPT (which is where my libraries are anyway) and then had a friend convert the deck to ODF.

Sshh don't tell anyone.

I do plan to install Symphony before LS09 but I could not take any chances, what with the tight deadlines.

9 - I used the symphony version included in ND85. My sheets are fairly simple, text and some images. I had no problems whatsoever, the only thing was that switching between SnagIt and Notes/Symphony was slow. No crashes, no slow screenredraws.
One thing that was missing: i was unable to change the fontcolor of a url, so i skipped the http part of the urls mentioned in the presentation.