{"id":3880,"date":"2010-09-14T16:50:54","date_gmt":"2010-09-14T20:50:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/?p=3880"},"modified":"2010-09-14T16:50:54","modified_gmt":"2010-09-14T20:50:54","slug":"we-need-a-new-presentation-tool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/2010\/09\/14\/we-need-a-new-presentation-tool\/","title":{"rendered":"We Need a New Presentation Tool"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/sog\/4990579381\/\" title=\"Google Docs by sogrady, on Flickr\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm5.static.flickr.com\/4146\/4990579381_549f87c411.jpg\" width=\"500\" height=\"304\" alt=\"Google Docs\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I hate slides, you hate slides, and the military <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/dangerroom\/2010\/09\/revealed-pentagons-craziest-powerpoint-slide-ever\/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed:+wired\/index+(Wired:+Index+3+(Top+Stories+2))\">really<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/04\/27\/world\/27powerpoint.html\">really<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.airforcetimes.com\/news\/2010\/09\/army-sellin-calls-powerpoint-a-crutch-092010w\/\">hates<\/a> slides. Slides are everything Tufte <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/wired\/archive\/11.09\/ppt2.html\">says they are<\/a>: &#8220;presentations too often resemble a school play &#8211; very loud, very slow, and very simple.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>But then we all hate taxes too. Barring a miracle or some sort of populist revolt, we are stuck with slides for the foreseeable future. Given this, the question becomes triage: how do you minimize the damage? The answer, sadly, is that it&#8217;s not easy. <\/p>\n<p>The options from a presenter&#8217;s standpoint can be grouped into three buckets: native clients (e.g. Powerpoint, OpenOffice.org, etc), browser based (e.g. Google Docs, Prezi, etc) and HTML (e.g. S5). None of these options is ideal for my usage.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><b>Native Clients<\/b>:<br \/>\nThe mainstream option. Most of you are likely using Keynote or Powerpoint, depending on your operating system of choice. Neither are options for me, as I run neither Mac nor Windows as my primary operating system. Which is no real loss for me, in all likelihood, because while I&#8217;ve used Powerpoint extensively I&#8217;m not a fan of the product. Like many of its Office brethren, it&#8217;s suffering from the weight of years of innovation: there are simply too many bells and whistles, the majority of which I have no intention of ever using. Perhaps Keynote is better, but it&#8217;s still a non-starter for me. Which leaves, among the mainstream options, OpenOffice.org&#8217;s Impress. Which I want to like, but just can&#8217;t. It&#8217;s clunky, a few years behind from a design perspective, and is even more difficult to navigate than Powerpoint. <\/li>\n<li><b>Browser Based Clients<\/b>:<br \/>\nAs an unrepentant fan of browser based apps, this would seem like a solid marriage. But they each have their issues, above and beyond the perptual limitation of SaaS apps, offline functionality. Google Docs&#8217; font selection, for example, is terrible [see above]: I&#8217;m no typography junky, but <i>six<\/i> fonts? Really? Prezi, meanwhile, is an innovative tool, but one that falls down on portability. Yes, it has an export capability, but have you looked at the package it exports? I created a test presentation with nothing in it; the resulting exported archive was 18.7 MB, included two directories and a 4.3 MB *.exe file. No thank you. Zoho, meanwhile, while a bit more generous with the font selection &#8211; 19 to Google Docs&#8217; 6 &#8211; still didn&#8217;t have my preferred Helvetica Neue. I&#8217;ve also had some issues with image uploading and manipulation in the past.<\/li>\n<li><b>HTML<\/b>:<br \/>\nEvery so often I consider switching to straight HTML based slides, a la S5 or Slidy. But then I imagine walking up to one of those harried, possibly-competent conference A\/V guys, handing him a memory stick, and saying &#8220;No, actually, it&#8217;s not a PDF or PPT, it&#8217;s a self-contained HTML file, just fire it up in the browser, you&#8217;ll be fine!&#8221; And then I don&#8217;t consider it any more. I present off of my own machine whenever and wherever I can, but there are a great many times when that&#8217;s not possible, practical or both. So whatever I&#8217;m using has to work on someone else&#8217;s machine, and easily. <\/p>\n<p>Throw in the fact that many HTML formats require a working knowledge of stylesheets &#8211; where my abilities are more generally described by, &#8220;Ok, let&#8217;s refresh&#8230;wow, no, that didn&#8217;t work at all&#8230;&#8221; &#8211; and the HTML presentation options aren&#8217;t a great fit for me.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Which leaves what, exactly? Not much. My friends from the Clutter team have recently pointed me at <a href=\"http:\/\/git.clutter-project.org\/toys\/tree\/pinpoint\">Pinpoint<\/a> [see below],  which I may experiment with if I can get it to export to PDF (even after installing Cairo 1.10, it&#8217;s balking).<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/sog\/4990579353\/\" title=\"Pinpoint by sogrady, on Flickr\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm5.static.flickr.com\/4147\/4990579353_9886850043.jpg\" width=\"500\" height=\"295\" alt=\"Pinpoint\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Others have pointed at HTML5 based options like <a href=\"http:\/\/5lide-maker.appspot.com\/\">5lide<\/a>, but that&#8217;s far too restrictive to output the kind of slides I like to deliver. Nothing I&#8217;ve looked at yet is ready to replace OO.o, then, a tool I actively dislike. None of this would be a big deal if we didn&#8217;t have to prepare so many presentations. But we do, and so I&#8217;m desperate for a tool that I like using, or at the very least, don&#8217;t hate to use. Here&#8217;s what I&#8217;m looking for:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><b>Export<\/b>:<br \/>\nThe tool must export to &#8211; at a minimum &#8211; PDF. ODP\/PPT are nice to haves, but PDF is non-optional. Any tool whose export involves a *.exe file is disqualified. <\/li>\n<li><b>Features<\/b>:<br \/>\nAs a presentation tool, it should be able to create a presentation. Meaning incorporate text, graphics and, I suppose, audio and video easily in a presentation capable format. Inline integration with credible clip-art or stock photo libraries would be excellent.<\/li>\n<li><b>Fonts<\/b>:<br \/>\nYou have two choices: come with lots out of the box, or let me add my own.<\/li>\n<li><b>Markup (HTML, etc)<\/b>:<br \/>\nIs acceptable as an authoring mechanism, whether it&#8217;s HTML, Markdown, Pango, etc. Packages requiring even rudimentary CSS skills are disqualified.<\/li>\n<li><b>Network<\/b>:<br \/>\nAny presentation tool that assumes network connectivity is disqualified. Simple as that. The first rule of presentations is that you cannot rely on the network during a presentation.<\/li>\n<li><b>Offline (browser)<\/b>:<br \/>\nOffline authoring for the browser based tools would be ideal, because many of my presentations get written or at least tweaked on a plane. It&#8217;s not a must have, however.<\/li>\n<li><b>Operating System (native)<\/b>:<br \/>\nThe tool must be either cross platform or Linux compatible. <\/li>\n<li><b>Opinionated Sofware<\/b>:<br \/>\nBest case, the tool is opinionated. I don&#8217;t want a tool that is going to encourage me to produce a few dozen slides of bulleted lists; I want a tool that encourages me to think creatively about what my presentation. Prezi&#8217;s got that part down, at least.<\/li>\n<li><b>Pretty<\/b>:<br \/>\nLastly, the tool should be pretty. Pretty is a feature, <a href=\"http:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/2006\/03\/06\/pretty-is-a-feature\/\">remember<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>What about you? What do you use to create your presentations?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I hate slides, you hate slides, and the military really, really hates slides. Slides are everything Tufte says they are: &#8220;presentations too often resemble a school play &#8211; very loud, very slow, and very simple.&#8221; But then we all hate taxes too. Barring a miracle or some sort of populist revolt, we are stuck with<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-collaboration"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3880\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}