- it's in flash
- I can't really share my presentations with anyone
- I have to design my slides online, or use an offline app (paid) which will connect online
- There is no good support for full screen presentations in Linux
- It doesn't use a portable format
From looking at the features, I really couldn't see why it couldn't be implemented using SVG (except for the flash movies embedded in the presentation maybe...), so I began to search for a project that would do the same, using SVG, and I found Jessyink.
Jessyink is exactly what I was searching for. It's a plugin for Inkscape which adds the possibility to design slides from an SVG, and ships a javascript library inside the resulting SVG for execution. The result is that:
- It's portable: apps that understands SVG and javascript can play it (e.g. Firefox, on any platform. Arora did fine too, but Konqueror wouldn't work)
- It's an open format, with open standards: I can send the svg to someone, and they can edit it with inkscape using the Jessyink plugin
- The possibilities are endless: I'm not limited to styles and fonts found on prezi.com, I can choose whatever font I want, whatever style I want
- It's open-source!
- It not only supports prezi-like effects inside slides, but also traditional slides, that can each behave like prezi-like presentations
Jessyink is harder to use than prezi.com though, but if you know how to use Inkscape, you will soon be able to do what you want with it.
Here is a quick & dirty example I made with Jessyink. Some tips:
- Use the arrows to navigate through the presentation
- Use the 'i' key to get an index of the slides (two slides in that case)
- Use the 'd' key to draw on the presentation as you go through it!
- See this page for more tips!
Posts
5 comments:
Hey thanks for the post!
Please let me clarify a few things here:
- I can't really share my presentations with anyone - yes, you can. On your My page just click any prezi thumbnail you have created, then the share tab. You can even invite people to collaborate in a password protected email.
- Prezi offers an online and offline editor as well. You can download your prezis using both. You can also upload them on a thumbdrive or a mem stick and carry wherever you go. Even present them without any additional software or internet connection.
Hi razo,
Let me first say again that I was very impressed by prezi.com when I tried it. It's a great tool, but whenever I can, I tend to use open-source technology, for many reasons.
Well sure I can technically share my prezi presentations with people, provided:
- they get a prezi account
- they have flash installed
- they have an Internet access
I've gotten the offline editor, but it seems I can't use it unless I get a paid account for prezi. Even then, from what I understand, it will download my presentations from prezi.com, so the Internet access issue is still there, for several reasons:
- I need to be able to work even if I don't have an Internet access
- I would like to make nice presentations for my company, but they won't let me put private business contents on a third-party website
There's other issues I didn't mention in my post actually, for example:
- What happens if prezi.com closes? How can I be sure that I won't lose all my work, and that I will be able to edit it again? I'm pretty sure my svg files will be playable even if Inkscape stops being developed, and even if that happened, I could code a new program that follows the standard.
- I can't get the offline player in prezi to display full screen on Linux, and I actually have to use wine to make presentations.
On the Jessyink website, some users have suggested that it would be great to have an online interface to generate these SVG. Maybe that could be a good market move for prezi. Not that I don't believe that prezi can make good money even with Jessyink around, open-source products can go unnoticed for years in the Windows world ;-)
I've been partial to S5 myself. Instead of doing SVG, it's based on XHTML+CSS+Javascript. It also degrades gracefully into a nicely formatted presentation summary.
http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/
Hi Chris,
Thanks for your comment. I'm aware that there are many open-source technologies to do presentations, and S5 looks very nice. What I like in Jessyink is the ability to have prezi-like effects, what is called "views" in Jessyink, which allows to zoom & turn as you present a slide.
Post a Comment