Legal Research

Online Presentation Tools

By Simon Fodden

There’s a good overview of four online presentation tools — “PowerPoints” in the clouds — over at ReadWriteWeb. We’ve already looked at Zoho Show 2.0 here on Slaw, and everyone should be familiar with what Google Docs can do in that respect (not much). A new player, 280 Slides, is starting to make online son et lumière look really interesting: you can pluck images out of Flickr and you can download your finished presentation to PowerPoint 2007 format, if you wish.

But I have to say that SlideRocket is the one to watch. Still in closed beta (I’m waiting for my account), I’ve had to content myself with the SlideRocket promo presentation and the ReadWriteWeb review. On this limited basis, it look as though it’s going to be not simply decent but stunning. It’s built on Adobe’s platform, which goes a long way to explaining why the optics are good — and when it comes to slide show apps, optics are where it’s at. It’s got the sort of transitions that Mac users have come to know and love and an ability to use your presentation offline; as well, it will accommodate third-party plugins, a smart move that’s bound to spread functionality out beyond the corners of the envelope. My beef is that it seems that if you want movies or sound you have to use Flash to create the objects — not something that’s available to everyone, unless Adobe comes out with a simple Flash maker.

SlideRocket will be free for individual users and have a pricing policy for business use that will be announced when the app goes public.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on June 27, 2008 (boomark / email).