Prezi - The Zooming Presentation Editor | Hacker News Reader

Prezi - The Zooming Presentation Editor

prezi.com

15 pointsgulbrandr9 comments

Prezi is certainly a cool innovation in presentation style, but you have to be even more careful than you do with Powerpoint that you don't let your presentation be dominated by the tool over the content.

I've seen Prezi used subtly to great effect, but I've also seen it abused where complex transformations are used for what really should have just been plain text.

Where it works is where you have a true overall structure (such as a map or blueprint or the object you are talking about) that actually represents your presentation, and isn't just some abstract pattern you've decided to shape your text around. For example a presentation on a new model of car where the overall structure is the drawing of the car and the Prezi moves around and zooms in as you discuss individual parts.

Our presenters used it at last month's DrupalCon in Chicago.

On the plus side, you can build very quickly once you get the hang of it and not get sidetracked with a lot of formatting options. It's also nice to be able to flip to a non-linear mode where you can just click to whatever it is you want to talk about and not flip back through your slides. The zooming provides for very simple hiding and emphasis of points, including "hiding" extra content for future sharing (eg, embedding).

The big downside is you have to be really careful with the panning and zooming. What seems like 'just a little' when your building can easily feel like an amusement park ride when it's on a big screen. Also, you can't upload to slideshare unless you record it as a video first.

Overall, we were very happy with it, and the audience seemed to enjoy it. But you definitely want to build some practice Prezi's before doing the real thing. We found it very useful, but it has the potential to be very distracting if you aren't careful.

For some reason, Prezi has been really widespread at humanities venues since 2009 or so, especially any sort of computer/media/digital-oriented areas of the humanities. But, I've never seen it used at a CS conference.

Perhaps this is a shortsighted and gross overgeneralization, but I would imagine CS conference attendees are more interested in the content of a presentation than the humanities. Presentation style and stylistic elements that can make or break some presentations are more important in a digital media oriented field than more academic or technical fields.

Yes, but I think the parent wants to point out that it is popular in humanities as in academics (who are also interested in content).

To me the difference seems to be that CS people are more aware of current technical possibilities, and take a "we've been there before" attitude. To humanities people, it's all new and spectacular. And who doesn't want to impress their peers?

As someone who works on the border between both fields, I can only hope this soon blows over. It tends to be overused and annoying, though I can see it as beneficial in non-academic fields.

That's probably true, although parts of CS have an almost active aversion to new technology, especially on the UI side, which might be part of it. Sort of the stereotypical bearded Unix guru who doesn't want any of your damn newfangled touchscreens or GUI widgets near his computer science.

(I don't even really mean that negatively; my own computing style tends towards CLI, and/or "weird" window managers like dwm.)

Among people I've seen use it, there's this tendency to dive in head first to use it. I get the impression that the general thinking is to differentiate themselves from the crowd (and since I'm in school, the thought is they'll get better marks). In reality, a bad presentation is a bad presentation, no matter how you package it (lipstick on a pig anyone?). Once Prezi becomes a norm like PowerPoint (I think it will), I'm curious how Prezi will position itself

Great tool - highly recommended.

One tip: go very easy on the movement - you'll make your audience sea sick!

good use of prezi, the presentation on the chip & pin break from last year.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv3dxjvqk7Y

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