The purpose of this article is to post my findings about Macromedia Breeze, specifically the Breeze Presenter. For those that do not know what Presenter is, Breeze Presenter basically converts PowerPoint presentations into Flash presentations. These presentations are generated through a PowerPoint Plugin. Through this plugin you can add voice over to slides, you can put swf's in place of slides and you can add flash video.

When we first started to explore Macromedia Breeze we were under the impression that we had to use the Breeze server in order to use Breeze Presenter. This can't be further from the truth. In fact Macromedia won't really tell you this on their site. We have found that it runs just fine outside of the Breeze server. The only thing we loose is the tracking and some of the poll options. But in my opinion those are small options and a huge cost savings.

We have found that Breeze Presenter is very limited in its customization options. But we found some ways around that. There was no source provided for any of the swf files that the Breeze Presenter publishes from breeze, so we had to look at other ways to customize it.

Themes and XML

We did noticed there were Themes included with Breeze that allowed you to give your presentation a different look and feel, but there was no way through the plugin to adjust many of the options available.

What we did was to create our own Theme based off an existing Theme.

Let's explore one of the pre-installed themes:

C:\Program Files\Macromedia\Breeze 5\Themes\Club Orange

If you have breeze presenter installed you will see a sub folder called "data". In this folder is an XML file called "vconfig.xml" which contains:

The above, as you can see, gives you a lot more options than what is available through the Theme Editor. You can even go as far as swap out the Macromedia logo at the bottom of the Breeze presentation with the line:

There is also another XML file that is crucial and is located here:

C:\Program Files\Macromedia\Breeze 5\Themes\language.xml

Here is an excerpt from it:

I am only putting part of it here, because in that file it has the menu text for all of the other languages.

But you can see from the above that you can actually get rid of that horrid text shadow in your Breeze presentations.

This came in handy with our site we were doing since we needed to make the presenter white and the text black. Which if you try to do this through the Theme Editor it won't allow you. I think it won't allow you because there is no way to get rid of the Shadow without altering the XML.

Other useful findings

We found that you can use a "loadMovie" command and pull the "viewer.swf" that is generated from PPT into a shell. We also found that in Breeze there is no way to turn off the background of the Breeze. You can change the color of the background, but you can't remove it or set it's alpha to 0. We got around this by loading breeze into a shell and setting up an actionscript mask that hid the background. You have to use an actionscript mask and not a layer mask. Using a layer mask causes all of the text to disapper.

In Summary

We found out quickly that Macromedia doesn't support any of what we were trying to do. So we had to go it blind. We were creating a seemless user experience for our clients. One in which they could present Breeze Presentations to online customers without them ever having to leave their site or the flash shell. In the flash shell we gave them options to present other breeze presentations as well as other documents. We basically created a virtual center where the customers could come in, listen to presentations and download supporting documentation in the same flash movie. It is a shame they don't provide the source for the flash files that get generated, if they did this product would be the greatest thing since sliced bread.