"WARNING<p>impress.js may not help you if you have nothing interesting to say ;)"<p>Although said in jest, this struck me as poignant. I feel that many of us spend a disturbingly large amount of time researching, downloading and "hello world"ing all of these pretty well-marketed tools, but most of us still haven't figured out what we're going to build with them.<p>Opiate for the hackers. I plead guilty.
This is really slick.<p>I'm torn by Prezi. It's the moral antipode to Tufte's philosophy of presentation. It seems like it should be objectively evil. But the infinite canvas aspect of it makes the slides so dense they actually kind of work for reading online; the transition animations, annoying as they are, add pacing and create a reading experience that somewhat mirrors the delivery of an actual talk.<p>I'd love to hear some success stories from people who have actually delivered Prezi talks in public.
Looks fantastic although I have to admit these prezi types of presentations start to give me a headache after about 10 seconds from the motion. Also while the prezis look undeniably cool, I still use the standard slideshows in that I find the transitions to be a little too much whiz-bang fancy where standard slides are minimalist. But this is a very cool demonstration of CSS transforms.
This is mind-blowing, I like how he uses transitions to empower content.<p>The transitions themselves are fantastic and like others in the thread I don't find them fancy at all, in fact I think they add movies like continuity to presentations for cheap, which if used wisely can enable story-telling style of information delivery.<p>I can see myself using it for info-graphics and tutorials, other than presentations, by making it do non-linear (zooming in/out or using hrefs) flow of content.<p>Oh now I realize why I liked it so much, it also removes the single most annoying feature of reading content on the web - the constant scrolling and zooming, like readability it alleviates that pain for you, by zooming in to the content that matters the most at <i>this</i> instant.
I have a friend who gets paid to simply make Prezis for clients (large and small). The tool was designed for anyone to use and yet she still gets plenty of business.<p>There is a gigantic market for making stuff that makes other people look good. People are looking for something that is like Powerpoint, but a bit better because PP is considered boring. This, if refined and made easier to use for intermediary content creators, has enormous financial potential because it works on all devices.
There's an inkscape extension Sozi <a href="http://sozi.baierouge.fr/wiki/en:welcome" rel="nofollow">http://sozi.baierouge.fr/wiki/en:welcome</a> which is also very easy to use tool to make prezi like presentation and it's also FOSS.
Impress.js is an awesome piece of tech—but I wouldn't use it for a presentation:<p>There's just a very fine line between over- and underdoing a presentation. It's never good just to dash off a presentation with lousy layout and design but it may not be beneficial to overdo a presentation as well. Too much FX and animations makes you at a certain point needy: "Look what I did to impress you", "Look, another animation!", "How nice, isn't it??", "And here another 3D effect, awesome isn't it? I spent the entire day to make the rotation perfect, just for you because I like you!". After the 5th animation the viewers think you are a needy guy, needing approval, spending to much time on design than content and having nothing to do.<p>Different with pure web presentations for a large audience, then such tools are nice, but I don't know if they convert better than a gold old landing page.
I love this new format for presentations. I think the fact that slides are arranged in a spatially distinct way - and are linked fluidly - aids my comprehension. Would be interesting to find out if this is actually true (and not just expectation based upon novelty appeal).
Yesterday was the first day I'd blocked Hacker News to get work done, ironically it was the moment when I needed something like this the most. Oh well, seems really cool. I'm glad the flash, closed alternative Prezi has a rival as this seems far more responsive.
In looking at the stylesheet for the impress.js demo, I wonder if this <a href="http://leaverou.github.com/prefixfree/" rel="nofollow">http://leaverou.github.com/prefixfree/</a> would be useful to keep things tidy when rotating content and such.
I'm actually a little surprised that no one has mentioned reveal.js yet. Different idea, but worth mentioning. Impress.js is more like those font animation we see lots these days. It's pretty cool.
excellent tool. For content creation it could be coupled with some markdown tool written in javascript.
I have been using this approach for a while, I put the content in a textarea and the browser does the conversion for you. The formatting instructions (to apply css styles) are similar to LaTeX which i am familiar with and is not too visually intrusive.<p>You can see an example at <a href="http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/netmap/slides.html" rel="nofollow">http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/netmap/slides.html</a>