Rethinking PowerPoint: The New Wave of Presentation Tools | Hacker News Reader

Rethinking PowerPoint: The New Wave of Presentation Tools

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29 pointserin_bury7 comments

There may well be a better alternative to the local maximum of powerpoint and keynote out there somewhere, but Prezi sure isn't it. At first it was a novelty; now it's just annoying.

I wholeheartedly agree. I've seen a few talks created with that tool and the "flying around the screen" gets old pretty fast.

I have a feeling that Prezi connects more with people who want to passively watch something explained to them, not very different from watching a youtube video.

Prezi certainly seems to take Tufte's "chartjunk" to a ridiculous new extreme. The crazy transitions distract the user from the content, and make it almost impossible to really go back and review things after the fact.

I missed a local Android developer group's meeting a month or two and I wanted to go back to review the materials from talk I missed. They mailed out a link to their presentation, which turned out to be a Prezi slideshow. I tried to find some of their code examples and gave up because trying to navigate the presentation wasn't worth my time.

Correct me if i'm wrong, but i think that creating new tools to fix the apparent problem is missing the point. the point is: public speaking isn't nowhere near the comfort zone of most people – which is fine. it's something that can be trained and developed, and once that process is complete, most people suddenly stop trying to hide behind a story-telling set of superboring slides and start giving great presentations.

You're 100% correct. PowerPoint just amplified the symptoms of what's wrong with presentations (corporate, academic or otherwise). People started to shift their focus to things that didn't matter as much (the slide deck) and deviate from the content. These same problems will occur no matter what new presentation tools are invented and will continue to be the same annoyance.

At the same time, products like the Screen.io are providing tools to facilitate good aspects of presentations and these are types of tools that should be built.

Another alternative to consider is using a tool that is not WYSIWYG (like Org-Mode). I think putting together a presentation that's good enough for most things--e.g. a developer talk about some technology--with a tool like Org-Mode is easier and faster than using PowerPoint, Keynote or any other similar tools.

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