WorldMaps+

A presentation should not have too many lines on a page and sometimes, putting a big image of the world will help everybody stay more focused on the speaker.
Great speakers do not want the audience to focus on the slide, meanwhile they are talking, but they use the slide to attract focus on them..

WorldMaps+ was the first app we developed and the reason was, it is very long and boring to color each time the countries to produce a report.
Many managers we interviewed, had to present biweekly sales reports, financial figures and many times they would try to customize pictures taken from Internet to speed up the process. But in fact, the result was not so great all the time.

The functionalities we built in the WorldMaps+ engine are those managers' most used activities: create group of countries, assign different colors, add comment on the legend with a flag.

Today, WorldMaps+ looks much different from its first releases and the every new version is getting closer and closer to our customers needs.

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Thematics+

Statistical data is what our economy is based on.
Evaluation of the big data, study of the coverage, identify the most interesting part everything is key.
In many companies arranging data on a world map is an everyday business. Multinational groups with headquarters in different nations, sales trends, population statistics, etc.
Everything looks more effective if organized on a map.

Problem is, coloring countries based on some values is an extremely intensive task. You need to find a customizable shape to add to your presentation, ensure the customization is clean and professional, that all the shapes have the use scale (format factor) and so on.
If the task is a periodic one, the burden might be extremely heavy.

Thematics+ derives from the engine of WorldMaps+ but organized in a way to present intervals and ranges. The answer to the tedious tasks of customizing the countries one-by-one was to create views and custom groups.

Today Thematics+ is a valid tool to generate perfect images to be inserted in a presentation to represent statistical or thematic information.

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Drafts+

When you work in an office, meetings may occur pretty frequently, particularly if you are in an area of business that require to convince people to do something, like sales, management reports and project management.
The roadmap of Drafts+ is a short one, the idea was very simple: reduce the paper usage in an office and improve communication among teams.

How often a manager sits at a table with its team and draw down some sketches of the slides they need to prepare for a meeting or a convention?
We knew the answer, very often.

In fact, some project managers we surveyed, reported stories of our their boss was keeping photocopies of his sketches to be compared later with the final deck look.
Sometimes the guy in charge of putting together the pages, would not understand the boss's hand-writing. Sometimes the symbols used were just confusing.
Plus there was a lot of paper used.

One company had a policy to drastically reduce the paper consumption to be more "green", so they would have removed some photocopying machines to promote the use of the electronic formats.

The point was, each meeting would have come with tons of paper written sketches, than some copies to be shared to the whole team, than maybe some additional version printed to add more notes and corrections... not very much "green".

So, Drafts+ comes from the needs to bring a simple layout design tool tailored on the day-to-day office activities.
The manager assembles a form (or together with the team, working on external monitor), shares the initial version and everybody is aligned on what needs to be done and how. The versions can be archived in a normal inbox or on the device and revision notes can be added to describe further. No need for paper if not for the very final version of the presentation.

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Designs+

Developing an app is the new thing.
Few years ago everybody wanted to have a website, then a blog, then a Facebook account.
Today more and more people understand how easy is to bring your ideas to live and share them with the world and this is supported and enriched by the mobile devices.

Working on wireframing is a niche job, not many people out of the design business know about it.

The first point we wanted to address was: make it easy for everybody. Bring it to the people, so that, anybody, even with little professional experience could build a concept and promote it. You are on a train or in an airport lounge, you have an idea and instead of just write it down, you could create a little model or a mind map and share it, or save it for later to be enriched.

The second goal was to develop something easy to learn how-to-use. We started from the Drafts+ model and, we investigated what we could add more. The app have to produce enough information to communicate guidelines about design to others both visual and textual on any device or computer. We developed a series of HTML reports that can be read on any platform containing the visual description of the screens together with notes and active links, so that anyone could verify the UX even without Designs+ installed.

The third point we wanted to cover was the space usage on the device. Like all the other apps from morepaths.com, the space on disk of the app should be very limited to allow installation also on devices like the iPod Touch. We liked the idea of having the possibility of designing an iPad app on an iPod, it was so cool!
The library of widgets we integrated in Designs+ is minimalist but effective, we took the most frequent symbols or UI elements used in web & app design and this should cover most of the standard tasks. Designs+ is constantly improving thanks also the feedbacks of our users (new functionalities, new widgets, etc.), the first versions of the app was supporting only iPad but starting from iOS 8, now the software is universally available on iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad and all the projects can be shared and edited seamless among devices.

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Perfect+

Creating presentations is not just assembling lines of text together. There is a very thin line that divides a professional looking slide deck from an amateur one. The space between the paragraphs, the font, the color of the text, the position of the company logo, the length of the title, all these factors and even more to add, affect drastically the way a page can tell a story.
Many of the people who input into JustPerfect's engine worked before as project manager, sale or marketing manager. The most common slides, the formatting which works, the creative process everything has been considered, and it is today part of this app.

Why another tool for presentations?
We had a long discussion about whether to go in this direction, but at the end the goal was clear, reduce workload in the presentation-making business, add expertise, provide a quick and light app that could work easily on an iPhone or an iPad everywhere. Today, if you browse a little on Internet you will find thousands of site or companies that will provide you with a "Free" version of their application or online system. All you need to do is register.
All the presentation editors, that are on the market, come with tons of templates beautiful images and fantastic effects.

We were not totally convinced by the current scenarios because:

Our goals were clear: ensure user privacy, effective and minimalist formatting, drastically reduce the space used on the device.

So we started our process with a list of most used slide decks, organized per type, highlighting how many times we would have used a picture or a transition.
At the end of the process what we decided to do was to work on the most frequent layouts, the spacing, the formatting and discard everything that was not "minimalist enough".

The result

Perfect+ is a presentation editor, with tons of templates that reflect the real day-to-day project management requirements, enriched with powerful functionalities that allow to manipulate the text-formatting totally independently of the content.
We also ensured that the size of the application was contained. Today Perfect+ occupies only 60 MBytes on a device; a perfect companion to carry with you on your iPhone, iPad without affecting the overall disk usage.

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