Ask HN: Presentation Software? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Presentation Software?

17 pointspquerna10 comments

Ideally I wanted some wiki format -> HTML5 sweet animation generator, that also could output a PDF.

I looked at the ancient S5: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/

But even Eric Meyers is back to using Keynote now: http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2010/05/07/web-2-0-talk-html5-vs-flash/

What do you use for presentations at Conferences?

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Keynote can output PDFs.

You may also want to check out 280 Slides: http://280slides.com/

280 Slides is by 280 North, YC08.

http://prezi.com/ ... most interesting thing to come to presentations in a looong time. Check out their take on Pecha-Kucha:

http://prezi.com/j9anrjn-gdwj/prezi-pecha-kucha-bw/

Danger is that you'll spend all your time futzing with the style and not put in enough substance.

Prezi. I like their canvas style approach. You can really get the big picture that way. Although I kind of agree that it's easy to get lost in styling, I do think it's better that I get lost than my audience. It's a real attention-grabber, I know from experience.

I've used beamer on occasion and think its great, albeit because I use LaTeX elsewhere: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamer_(LaTeX)

If you want to go the HTML5 route, I'm guessing pulling the relevant code out of the Google presentation highlighting HTML5 features would be a good exercise; source at: http://code.google.com/p/html5-slides/

For pure wiki syntax, I'd go with Pandoc which allows conversion to both S5 and PDF from a variety of markup languages: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

Although not exactly the right answer, but it might give some of you a few ideas. Here's a presentation that WebkitGtk's maintainer did for GCDS 2009: http://webkitgtk.org/gcds.html

And I use Beamer (Latex) myself because of the equations...

If you follow the "Present like Jobs" school, then Keynote is all you need.

Of course, most people would rather futz with their animations than rehearse. check out: http://wziwyo.com/?p=177

I create and present with Keynote on iPad, works great.

Before iPad, I used http://280slides.com/ on my Thinkpad.

I find Prezi very nice - although it doesnt meet your wiki to html5 generation critieria. http://prezi.com/

Showoff (http://github.com/schacon/showoff), Markdown > HTML/PDF.

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