/var/log/tinkerhouse

Restrictions are known to breed creativity. Having dropped Windows two years
ago, and given that [OpenOffice Impress][ooi] is a bit too heavy for my tastes and
machine (a humble Eee), i had to look for alternative presentation tools.

I do like having full control of my presentation and loathe the template system
of Powerpoint and Impress for setting text. I was already used to making PNG
slides and make a presentation using simple image viewers.

The best thing that happened to me regarding this issue was running into
[KeyJNote][kjn], which can grab your set of PNG’s, JPG’s or even a PDF file and
provide you with a beautiful presentation with clean and smooth transitions.
Better: it’s scriptable, it has a friendly GUI but, most importantly, all of the
presentation’s properties can be set via command-line options. It’s now my
one-stop application for all kind of presentations: i make the slides in
Inkscape or Scribus, and then output PNG’s or a PDF and off we go.

And there’s some promising developments on this side of things:
[Prezi.com][prezi], still in beta (and unfortunately not free software) gives
you a new way of presenting using only one big diagram, and the progression of
the presentation is made by zooming and panning through the image. The
[inkscape-devel][inkdev] had some interesting discussion on how to implement
this kind of paradigm using SVG. I’m dying to see if there’s some progress in
this.

Lastly, and also via [inkscape-devel][inkdev], a great new Javascript app –
[JessyInk][ji] — was released, and it allows you to create a presentation in
Inkscape which can be viewed in your browser using neat SVG magics.

There’s certainly a bright future for presentation tools, especially now that
we’re slowly breaking free from the dull Powerpoint models that have been
haunting us all these years.

[ooi]: http://www.openoffice.org/product/impress.html
[kjn]: http://www.linux.com/feature/62278
[prezi]: http://www.prezi.com
[inkdev]: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel
[ji]: http://code.google.com/p/jessyink

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 29th, 2009 at 17:44 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.