Microsoft Sway Puts Website Images In Their Best Light

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The Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) Office suite just got a new addition called Sway. Microsoft Sway is a simple tool that takes your photos, text and Web videos and automatically lays them out to create sharp, modern web pages. Best of all, everything you include in one “sway” is found at a single Web address, and the page on the user’s browser renders itself based on the user’s device, and then automatically scales the page to best fit the size the screen size.

Moreover, sways are simple and to create, but include many of the interactive web design tricks you see today such as large header images, floating text, images that appear then disappear as you scroll, embedded video, stacked photos as well as click-to-enlarge-photos.

Statement on Microsoft Sway

“This is another option for Office users to take their ideas, put them into a beautiful format with the kind of elegance that would otherwise require a designer,” explained Michael Atalla, a product director on Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)’s Office team. “We’re trying to take that designer’s instinct and put that into an app that easily allows people to get their ideas down onto a canvas with no pre-defined borders or edges.”

More on Microsoft Sway

The Microsoft Sway interface is very easy to use. You just upload some images, choose the ones you want to highlight or group, pick a vertical or horizontal orientation, add some text, maybe a YouTube video if you want, and you’re ready to go. Sway automates the design process and lays out the entire page right in front of you, including buttons to share your pages via Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites..

After saving, a sway can be viewed publicly viewed at its discrete address, and it automatically updates if any  changes are made. To preview a sway, you just put the address in your different devices and check out the results.

Microsoft also offers a number of sway templates to choose from. Sway also scans the images you load in and suggests a color palette based on colors in your photos. That said, Sway does not offer a lot of additional bells and whistles right now. You can change the colors used for templates and backgrounds, but that’s about it.

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