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Racontr, a French company that has been working on an online platform for interactive visual storytelling since 2013, has brought their product out of beta this week.
I noticed it first at the Tribeca Film Festival’s Tribeca Hacks in late 2013, and since then they have continued to add to the platform, completely mindful of the perils of responsive design on multiple devices, building the interface to be as visually-guided as possible, and, from the business side, changing their plan structure to bring users in through a freemium-style model.
Although the developers thought it would land squarely in the online-journalism category, it seems to have been picked up by a wider variety of content creators. Although this isn’t PowerPoint or Prezi (which also depends on an online platform as the home for the engine that runs the software), it could give them both good competition if making these interactive stories can be done simply enough and quickly enough for the truly non-technically inclined (or presentation builders in a hurry).
Besides a familiar timeline-and-stage visual model for the area where you build your interactive stories, they have made it possible to bring in full-fledged layer-based PSD files, a major advantage if you are already familiar with an Adobe approach to layering and animation. The interactivity can be tied frame by frame to an image, the type styling and text management is built into the interface, and they have tried to keep the design as straightforward and clean (read “FLAT”) as possible.
The free version deserves a spin if you have been looking for something between an HTML5 builder and the gap left by creating in Flash and then being locked out of the entire iOS world.
Try the platform for free at www.racontr.com
