Prezi and Alternatives

Prezi Logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I'm a fan of Prezi including their pricing for casual use (free). I've been using it to build a presentation for a talk I'm giving at the Blue Hill Library next Saturday. Here's a link to the Prezi.

Good ideas get copied (and improved) pretty quickly in the new world of the Web. A developer named Bartek Szopka from Poznań, Poland has developed a tool called impess.js, hosted on github here (https://github.com/bartaz/impress.js) and with a cool demo, also hosted on github here: impress.js demo by @bartaz.

The demo source has been fully annotated so that the geekier among us can Ctrl-U and follow his descriptions.

There are a bunch of other demos and links to tools on this page. I tried Strut and found it pretty good. There's also a markup language called S9 that can be used.

What's cool about impress.js (besides its being open) is that it does not depend on Adobe Flash (as Prezi does) and it gives you all the power of HTML5 and CSS3 to do cool things. For example you can turn anything into a link. Or import and SVG graphic. Or embed any kind of widget that you want to. I may decide to use it for all or part of my upcoming talk.

One disadvantage is that that you don't have the ability to do free-form navigation with all parts of your presentation live. When you use Impress you are one one slide or another and your links are only active when you are on the right slide. However!

References:
Strut on Github:
Strut Demo:
Impressionist has a nicer UI, but less actively developed.
Impress S9 Templates
S9 Site
And this stunning demo of a new way to present writing.