Microsoft launches Sway on Windows 10, exits preview

Microsoft’s new Office Sway promises to completely change the way you make your presentations. These cards can be images or text, like a normal presentation, but the more interesting possibilities make full use of Sway being an always-online, cloud-based program.

Sway also diverges from Microsoft’s traditional approach to developing software, especially Office.

The target audience are iOS developers who are willing to import their Xcode projects into Visual Studio using a newly developed Microsoft Objective-C compiler and extend their code to “take advantage of Universal Windows Platform capabilities”, such as Cortana.

After all, there’s a reason why Prezi and Zeetings have been so successful at swaying people – they’re fantastic presentation tools that introduce a level of panache, polish and, with Zeetings, true interaction.

Sway is designed to divorce the act of creating presentations from micromanaging fonts or color palettes. But preview users asked for a site that let them share all sorts of files with friends, fans, and the broader Internet.

When will Sway be generally available?

For nearly 12 of your good pounds, you’d expect the Windows DVD Player to be a polished, feature-rich replacement for Media Center.

Anyone can use Sway so long as they have a Microsoft account – there’s no Office 365 subscription required. Not sold? Look here at how Sway was used to create a remarkable resume/portfolio. “Add your content, and we’ll do the rest”, the Sway website boasts. Microsoft is obviously also planning on making it available for Android, though a launch date wasn’t specified. Future development will include the creation of Windows versions of the Grand Central Dispatch library that has proven popular for multithreaded OS X and iOS development. The Web bridge, Project Westminster, became available with the release of Windows 10 and Visual Studio 2015, while the Android bridge, Project Astoria, is in an invitation-only technical preview, aiming for a public beta in the fall.

With Sway, users can generate interactive reports and presentations – it’s like a souped up PowerPoint. Open source software like VLC player easily plugs the gap, but, if you do want to play DVDs the Windows 10 way, you’ll have to buy the app to help Microsoft pay all those licensing fees.

In any case for those who want to get their hands on the app for whatever reason, you can do so by heading on over to the Windows Store for the download.