Don't get me wrong, this looks incredible and works great, but can someone answer this question for me... "Why?" What's the point of this much 'flashiness' in a slide-based presentation? I feel like this would be more effort than it's worth. If you use something like Keynote on your Mac, you can make some pretty incredible and well done slideshows. I think this could be awesome and useful for some things (non slideshow related), but I think it's a bit 'too much' for a slide-based presentation.
Sometimes when I see all of these fancy JS plugins I feel like people need to be reminded "just because you CAN, doesn't mean you SHOULD." But again, this is well done and the author did a fantastic job coding this. I'm not trying to say anything bad on the quality of this, just the practical use.
A good reason for using a non-linear tool such as this, is that you're able to layout your points (slides) on an infinite canvas, and make use of that specific layout to better explain how each point fits into the whole structure.
For example, I've used impress.js to fan out from a central idea along different lines of work, each line being punctuated with different slides. The cool thing is, you can make a virtual overview slide that shows the whole clickable canvas.
I've also used the layout to embed images resulting from intermediate algorithm stages directly inside those stages in the diagram.
Besides that, and the flashiness which is definitely nice to have, your presentations are in an open format that's not locked to a specific vendor. (this is coming from someone with more than 10 years of academic presentations in powerpoint, which I now have trouble re-using due to almost 100% Linux everywhere. LibreOffice Impress 4.1 can display them, but much is lost in the conversion :)
Looks like this can do regular slides too. It's nice to be able to put slides online after your presentation is over, something you can't do with Keynote or Powerpoint.
> but I think it's a bit 'too much' for a slide-based presentation.
I disagree. I used this for 3 presentations by modding the demo app. After downloading, its as simple as writing HTML and CSS to create a presentation. Add a few section tags, then your custom markup+styles, and you're good to go.
For me, writing the HTML and CSS is easy. Maybe that's why I enjoyed using this for my presentations.
I'm a big fan of Prezi, and think that impress.js is pretty sweet, but I have to admit, every time I try to dive in and use either tool to build a presentation, I realize how much planning is required to execute one effectively.
I'm still a huge fan of reveal.js[1] and love the fact that I can get a rich presentation, with all the functionality I need in an easy-to-use, extensible framework. Ever since discovering it, I haven't been able to present well with anything else...
Agreed. Agreed so much that we built a presentation plugin with an HTML5 Canvas editor on the backend of WordPress to power presentations built with deck.js.
Oh and we also automatically create an embed and provide a modal for notes for supporting materials.
Presentation javascript frameworks are awesome (I have a list of like 50), but building in them is not for the feignt of heart.
If you're interested in building a single-page website or app with similar layouting and transitions I recommend the much more flexible, cross-browser friendly jmpress.js[1] jQuery port.
I think this would be a great way to present a poster online, actually...
This varies wildly by discipline, but at least in my specific field, a lot of the "meat" (and almost all of the discussion) at scientific conferences is in the poster sessions. Talks are 12 minutes long, with essentially no time for questions afterwards (it's usually skipped to make up for other people's talks running long). Talks are more prestigious, but new results are usually presented as posters to allow for more feedback.
Putting up a .pdf of a 72"x42" poster after the conference is actually fairly terrible way to share the work.
Something like this to step through specific sections while showing the overall flow of the printed poster would be very effective.
That's the major problem with these presentations, IMO.
It'd be best not to make each slide a separate item on my browser's back/forward navgation, especially when there's built-in functionality to move about the presentation otherwise. It breaks usability and frustrates users!
I must say I'm impressed ! This is so great. Awesome work. And I'm totally gonna try this in my next talk. Till then i wanna ask that is there any way we guys make this more awesome by adding some effects and colors. Or possibly make an online editor, which will help common people to make such presentations ?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6532542
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3476403
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3519238
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4981416
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3414012
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4926839
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3424199
(edit: fixed "Perviously")