I had to make a few presentations in the last few months and I desperately wanted to move from MS PowerPoint/LibreOffice Presentations. I tried Keynote two years ago and when upgrading my OS I couldn’t find my iWork copy so I ended up with 20 presentations that were useless (vendor locked-in). But Keynote is very similar to PP anyway. I wanted something different. And about a year ago I saw Prezi with it’s large plain area on which presentation is placed and then traveled about, zoomed in and out etc. I really like the idea, but everything is done and saved in Flash and as such not really reusable.
I did some research and found a handful of nice solutions for creating nonlinear presentations (I’ll list all tools, the above mentioned included):
Prezi – a Flash based zoomable area http://prezi.com/
Ahead – very similar to Prezi and Flash based http://ahead.com/
Sozi – an Inkscape extension that creates Prezi like presentation in SVG http://sozi.baierouge.fr/wiki/Sozi
Dizzy.js – a JavaScript library for creating nonlinear presentation http://dizzy.metafnord.org/
Slidy – although linear by nature, it is using open standards like HTML and CSS http://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/Slidy2
JessyInk – another Inkscape extention http://code.google.com/p/jessyink/
As said, I did not like the Flash part of the first two. And I really liked that the last four use open formats and can be opened in almost every modern browser (a very bold statement!). I couldn’t get Dizzy.js to work in a decent time. JessyInk is still kind of linear, as is Slidy. So I ended up with Sozi. I very much liked to work in Inkscape and creating content was not hard. Then I only needed to define the sequence of how the content will be shown and I was done. Presentations work in my FF :).
Here’s an example.
Have fun
