I have been beta testing SlideRocket, a new online presentation tool. It has a very Keynote like approach to creating presentations, or should I say is also at the exact opposite end of the PowerPoint scale of slideware. Thanks be to God for Edward Tufte.
The beta period looks to be stable for the short term, but SlideRocket will give Google’s online slideware tool a bit of a hard look, but I just do not believe it will be enough to move the masses to SlideRocket.
SlideRocket is a Adobe AIR application supporting Flickr photos and the ability to directly import Google Spreadsheets. The beta tag sticks because I was not able to get accurate results on my Flickr search on three attempts. It also borrow’s from Adobe the deep grey design UI of the program.
SlideRocket’s visual feel is a 1-2 punch from Apple’s Keynote implementation. Similar transitions and overall look and feel to match. Was looking for SlideRocket to break some new ground here but I guess duplication is still the sincerest form of flattery.
One personal draw back: when your prezo includes multiple visual elements all your imaging must be accessible online. For a 20 slide presentation its not a big effort to migrate a dozen or so images online. Your going to be hard pressed not to move away from Keynote’s drag n drop feature for this ultra fast import task. My globalization prezo stands at 1072 slides and have been working with roughly 878 slides in presentation mode. With so many slides support up to 3 images per slide, Keynote stands far ahead of PowerPoint and SlideRocket.
Looking forward to the type of overall performance Keynote’s latest patch (4.0.3) on a new Powerbook with 4GB RAM can provide. Its a bit sluggish pushing over 1,000 slides on just 2GB of RAM. And with Keynote’s export tools I’ll port this presentation over to PowerPoint then import to SlideRocket to really kick the tires.
Tags: SlideRocket, Presentation, PowerPoint, slideware, Web2.0, keynote, SlideShare, network