Slashdot Mirror
Accelerated PowerPoint?
darkjohnson writes "If you're looking for an
excuse to offer your manager to approve that high end graphics card so you can
play Doom 3 at full tilt (on your
'breaks' ;) you might want to check out the Instant
Effects' technology as it
has the first product
(OfficeFX) that justifies upgrading your display hardware so you can do a POWER
POINT presentation of all things. Especially true if you're
the one stuck with the duty of making them look good. I saw this at Siggraph
and was not only impressed with the look but the number of people packed into
the booth to see it demoed, competing side by side with real
time 3D game renders and high-end effects software."
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/15/163420 6&tid=152&tid=10
BIG DEMO - 26MB
SMALL DEMO - 13MB
It's hard for me to look at their product. Their site doesn't seem to work in Firefox.
Because purty graphics make yearly losses look so much more exciting! The Red's never been so vibrant!
-- "I'm not a religious man, but if you're up there, save me Superman..."
...state that Powerpoint makes you stupid?
Imagine, now you can become dumb 3D style.
----
"I believe in karma. That means I can do bad things to people and assume they deserve it" - Dogbert
Do the people who make Powerpoint presentations honetly think the sweeps and other effects look good? Because I've seen many presenters getting embarassed about the letter flying around the screen when they're trying to make a point.
And if you just have to use some transition effect, pick one. Do not use a different random one on each page.
Text spiraling in at a million miles per hour! Now if only I can figure out how to connect that 4,000 watt subwoofer, I can add sound effects!
Zombies work for brains, wage slaves work for cash. If you work hard as a wage slave, you may be able to afford brains on your wages, plus a little extra. As a zombie, it's pretty much all brains all the time. This is why you should avoid becoming a zombie if at all possible.
I've been trying to say this for years. Accelerated graphics and nifty effects have a use in games, sure, but in the operating system arena they don't seem to be useful for much more than eye candy (and games are an area where eye candy usually helps).
Except presentation systems!. On IRC at least, where I rant about this occasionally I'm often dismissed with a "feh, who really cares" but presentation software is all about making a big impression (regardless of those who attempt to use them like note sheets that can be easily handled by a session guide)
Finally!
My chief complaint about Powerpoint has always been that while I sit here with a computer capable of rendering Lord of the Rings-style special effects, when I do a presentation it looks like build-your-own-greeting-card software circa 1996. There's just no excuse for it. it's not that hard to make things look nice instead of like crap. That little pixelated "dissolve"? Please. As a Mac user I'm watching for Keynote to become a more mature product. Either that or I use iMovie or - heaven forfend! - nothing at all. (That's right, just talking with maybe only the aid of a whiteboard can be quite refreshing occasionally!)
Anyway, I doubt if getting a new video card is going to make PP look more tasteful. Someone in Redmond would have to get a sense of style for that to happen. I'm not holding my breath.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
Say what you want about people who rely on PowerPoint (I know I do), but the app is actually pretty fun. I'm preparing a few training sessions now and PowerPoint is one of the things staff wants to learn. I've barely delved into it, but I'm finding a lot of Flash-like features. Sure, it's for "business", but it'll probably be the funnest training class I've ever held.
We shouldn't assume that, in this case, better graphics are more desirable. There are already complaints that PowerPoint's graphical features distract from the information that a presentation attempts to convey. Sometimes, a little simplicity goes a long way.
I'm the kind of guy that when I make a PPT presentation, it's black text on a white background made to emphasise what I'm doing rather than what the graphics are doing. However, if you're off selling stuff, this could be 'useful'. Not truely useful, but a piece of eyecandy that some marketeer or executive would want, earning the creators money. It's like a pop-up blocker add-in for IE. None of us are going to use it, but there's still a market for it, for better or for worse.
"Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is living in a state of sin." -- John von Neumann
Points of interest:
"Besides a graphics chip like the ATI Radeon, the program requires the .NET Framework (available from Windows Update) and DirectX 9. A pre-installation panel reviews your system and tells you whether you can continue setup."
"I discussed this with Don Brittain, the CEO of Instant Effects, and he said that in his view the product is 18 months ahead of the hardware cycle. This means that you need the very latest laptop to make sure you can show an OfficeFX show. But here's how it works."
-- "I'm not a religious man, but if you're up there, save me Superman..."
Even though I prefer using Keynote's polish over PowerPoint I think this thing is going to be overkill - presentations using this product are going to be brash, obnoxious infomercials with little substance - akin to watching Entertainment Tonight. So I am sure we will be seeing all the brash, obnoxious companies who favor PR over product using this.
Has Darl McBride purchased a copy yet?
"You mean to tell me that you need this $700 graphics card so you can see connection error dialogs at higher resolution?!?!!? Give me a break!"
Any cure how to convert back from a zombie to a wage slave other than kill -1 and hoping for a decent restart ?
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
...is built on the doom3 engine. great, and I thought it was bloating the product when they bundled some version of flight simulator with excel
http://leenks.com check it
As a technical instructor, I give presentations basically 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. And let me tell you, a rotating teapot isn't going to improve anyone's presentation. The best way to improve your presentation is to cut out as much as possible. Make yourself the focus of the presentation, not the clip art or whatever fancy crap you've got on the screen.
I'd highly recommend anyone out there who is looking to improve their presentations to check out "Presenting to Win", by Jerry Weissman. Excellent book on giving presentations.
The thinking not done because of the "elevator pitch" approach to business is one of the reasons so many companies are losing so much money.
AT&T is no longer trying to sell residential phone service.
Disney no longer makes animation. Instead, they want to make computers.
and so on. "There's no money in it" they whine. What they really mean is "nobody can explain in a PowerPoint presentation or an elevator pitch (30 seconds or less with no eye-glaze) how we can make hundreds of millions of dollars this quarter with no work or capital expenditure."
Everything formerly valuable is becoming a commodity while attention span is becoming the most expensive luxury in business. Nobody listens any more. Ideas and products that make hundreds of millions of dollars CANNOT BE EXPLAINED PROPERLY IN THIRTY SECONDS.
So, everyone runs from meeting to meeting, conference room to conference room frantically looking for something, ANYTHING that they can borrow to sell and get some short-term cash to the bank so the paychecks don't bounce (well, the paychecks for the half-dozen people who didn't get fired prior to the last quarterly stock-bump layoffs).
And, so business gets what they want. Accelerated PowerPoint so the elevator pitch can be 27 seconds instead of 30. Why, we're TEN PERCENT MORE EFFICIENT! LET'S FIRE SOME PEOPLE TO CELEBRATE!
It's just another icon to click. Another "efficiency token" to impress rooms full of accountants who, in the money-grab economy, are the only people who matter.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Did you read the article/site? This isn't about Microsoft PowerPoint... It's about a NEW presentation software called OfficeFX. The _new_ video card is required because this new 3D software is extremely demanding.
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
Don't bother if you have OOo. Ran the system check:
PowerPoint: Requires version 2002 or 2003.
Reccomendation: Purchase Powerpoint version 2002 or 2003.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
Anyone torrent it?
I
Rendering and outputting to video could have the same effect, and instead you burn your presentation to a DVD and use the DVD remote to navigate and cue your presentation. DVDs can already loop video, have basic overlay functions (that you might not even need), and can be used as a presentation medium. After the meeting you can hand out DVDs to interested clients.
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
Seriously, i know this if off-topic and all that, but light brown links on white and a touch lighter-brown background?
Horrible, guys. Horrible.
Let me guess, does it look like Apple's Keynote?.
... why does /. work without 2D/3D transitions and all (not to mention any palette issues) ?
Must have to do with some art of deviance; - or genius for the more faint of heart.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
This whole article sounds like a press release edited for slashdot consumption.
Just remove all the animations, gradients, and clipart and concentrate on the message.
"Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely."
Though I'm sure I won't be last to reference this, Yale's professor emeritus Edward Tufte has been writing about PowerPoint for a while. This piece in Wired helps explain how the cognative processes encouraged by PP presentations are subtly (and not-so-subtly) corrupting the way we perceive data. And you can purchase his whole essay here.
Whether or not you agree with all of Tufte's work, he is among the seminal thinkers about how we disseminate information. And having sat through too many years worth of PP presentations, I think he's dead right about this. I fact, I do my presentations from notes, using nothing more than dry-erase markers and a whiteboard. It never fails to impart an order of magnitude more information than a static bullet-point presentation ever could.
you know what would look good? a presentation that conveys information INSTEAD OF LOOKING LIKE A FRUSTRATED PIXAR MOVIE.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
this is pretty, but unreadable
I just wanted a show
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
i recently tried the OpenGL acceleration of Java2D in j2se 1.5 beta2 and have had nothing but failures:
>java -Dsun.java2d.opengl=True -jar Java2Demo.jar
OpenGL pipeline enabled for default config on screen 0
then the Java2Demo loads, but it runs VERY slow. much slower than with the normal non-OpenGL pipeline. i get the same results on a Windows XP system and a Linux 2.4 system with latest nVidia drivers for both platforms.
anyone have any thoughts?
Does Doom 3 have to appear everywhere on Slashdot? I know it's only a brief mention in passing, but seriously, enough with Doom 3 already. You don't need to give it any more attention than it already has.
OfficeFX uses WAY too much CPU/GPU for the simple graphics it produces. Simple non textured surfaces take forever to render, transitions...geez. What the heck did they program?
Same story, easier on the eyes
Amazon link includes a reference.
(You buy the book, he gets $$$).
Cause? Why to drool trolls onto /., of course.
I'm a developer and I need my eyes for important stuff, not to ruin at /.
I thought adding "sh" in front of the url was supposed to de-uglify these pages. What am I doing wrong and why such UGLY colors to begin with?
I happen to work in AV and this tool could be of a great help to us.
We just purchased several Dataton Watchout stations and this thing could complement it wonderfully.
the link has been sent to the appropriate persons where I work, let's hope testing will prove it stable and powerfull enough. It looks good on the website, reality might differ, it often does.
If you know Python you can use a library called slithy to make nice OpenGL-accelerated presentations. It's a library not an executable so you'll have to create a Python script for your presentation. Should not be too difficult for most slashdot users, plus you can add any C/OpenGL code (just wait for that Q3A source code...)
Yes, it takes some getting used to, but leave it there for a week and see if you don't like it better.
Yeah, right.
Pure genius.
I think the latest version of Flash comes with the ability to create Power-Point-like presentations. I know it's not as impresive as 3d accelerated graphics, but it is more impresive and cheaper than power point alone.
-- When did Ignorance Become a Point of View?
Sure, a spinning teapot isn't going to seal the deal ... but more powerful tools give an artist more options when creating a presentation to market whatever it is they're marketing. That's not to say that every slide needs 3D crap flying all over the place, but I'd argue that used appropriately and conservatively ... these new tools definitely offer a presenter a more complete toolset with which to convey their message.
Unfortunately, we'll probably suffer the same hell that Photoshop filters have yielded (i.e. overuse of the lense flare, and drop-shadow) but I believe the talented artist will use these new features to build some truly impressive presentations.
Just what we need--more wiz-bang effects and styles for procrastinators to obsess over, rather than crafting presentations which are actually informative. The only redeeming feature I see is that it requires nice hardware, which means people will hopefully think twice before either sending me this eye-candy nonsense or before bringing their presentation on a CD to a conference.
You don't have to become a marketing weeny to make a nice looking presentation. I reuse my LaTeX sources in HA-Prosper (putting it in outline form & adding additional illustrations where useful, of course).
I'm using Keynote now.
Big deal. I've been using Flash for presentations for years. I can incorporate 3D animation and have a full multimedia presentation withiout having to purchase two overly price products... I only need one overly priced product.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
My favourite presentation system. Shouldn't be difficult to add support in Firefox, Safari, etc; nothing in it that's not in the CSS spec.
This product has to run on a fairly upgraded machine.
You cannot convert the PowerPoints to make a self contained presentation.
So you either have to have a powerfull laptop or lug arround a desktop system.
In short it's great for large events and or trade shows.
> Did you read the article/site?
r po int.html
Did you?
Office FX works as an add on to PowerPoint,
it does not look like you can use it except with Microsoft Powerpoint so I dont know how you can describe it as not about Microsoft PowerPoint.
http://www.instanteffects.com/products_for_powe
I saw the demo, but I think Apple's Motion is much more impressive. It may not be marketed as a Powerpoint replacement, but it's well capable of doing just that (at least for marketing and PR folks that need a striking presentation).
http://www.apple.com/motion/
No, I don't own a Mac. I just think it's a cool application. If Apple can make it easy enough, why can't Motion take up some of the job people use Powerpoint (or Keynote) for?
What I would be more interested in is to know with which tools a professional presentation is built with. I guess everyone has had the experience that even when you know powerpoint in and out there is a huge difference between a presentation you can build yourself and some presentations you can see which have been professionally prepared:
The differences I can see:
Charts: What tools are there to make charts/graphs which look better than what excel can do?
How do you draw a schema of your server-farm or your database structure which renders nicely into 3D? I know my way around visio and powerpoint - but it always looks so -- basic.
Transitions: Are there any transitions you can buy without fancy movements but which look like video-transitions?
Did anyone try and download the demo on a system with XP SP2? It reports my DirectX is out of date and can't install... so I guess the installer doesn't detect 9.0c (from SP2) properly? Cool!
Joe
Another solution is to get an HDTV projector? Is that possible?
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
Apologies. High demand has temporarily taken our content server down. Movies are offline for the moment. They will be back up shortly. Thanks for your patience
Obviously it doesn't help their web server.
Whoever shilled them to get the story on slashdot should give the money back.
What's Next? 3D-Accelerated Word Processing! Watch the words glow as you type them! Every time you misspell a word, clippy practically pops out of the screen and your entire screen is filled with a box saying "You've misspelled 'foo'" along with vegas style lighting!
Where can I find the executive summary?
She loves me: 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0 She loves me not: 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688BF
Isn't this just the same thing Apple's Quartz Extreme already does? Using the GPU to perform realtime effects is an Apple thing since Jaguar, and Keynote (presentation app) uses the API hooks to do its transitions. Tiger will have more hooks with Core Video. Apple Motion also does realtime effects using the GPU.
errr, isn't that what references are for? When a guy refers a book to someone else he shouldn't get a reference for it? Ok....
Office already has hardware accelerated PowerPoint, as of, I think it was, Office XP. This lead to silky smooth fades and transitions.
As for OfficeFX, ATI has been giving away free copies for bloody ages: http://ati.com/buy/promotions/officefx/index.html
No, he didn't, and neither did the mod who rated him +1 informative.
;)
I've downloaded and installed the demo. It is a plugin to powerpoint only. It will neither install nor work in any capacity without powerpoint.
And it makes pretty animated 3d backgrounds, and makes everything do crazy spinning in 3d when you click on it. Right click and drag the screen, and the whole page can be twisted about in 3D, even flipping it around 180 degrees so you see the "back" of the text.
Very useful when presenting new world domination plans to the molemen who, of course, read everything from the back side.
Click on a line of text and all the letters spin independantly, with the first letters spinning first, then the next, etc. They even continue to spin while you right-click and spin the whole page into reverse-view, so you can see individually spinning letters from behind. Now if that doesn't add power to your point I don't know what will
But they still don't antialias the fucking fonts and you can still see the pixels. Sad. Like the moronic mod who modded that moron +1 informative.
everything in moderation
My chief complaint about Powerpoint has always been that while I sit here with a computer capable of rendering Lord of the Rings-style special effects, when I do a presentation it looks like build-your-own-greeting-card software circa 1996. There's just no excuse for it. it's not that hard to make things look nice instead of like crap.
What I've always wondered is why Word, having been in "development" for around a decade, still by default makes articles that look like crap compared to TeX/Latex, which has been around since 1985!
Yeah, you can say that Word makes a decent job at the typesetting if you haven't compared them much. But after reading a few articles in default Latex typesetting, an article in default Word typesetting is pure horror to your eyes. The text just pops out of an article collection, and not for its benefit.
What many people don't realize is that typesetting is not just about putting words one after another in a line. As Wikipedia says: "Typesetting involves the presentation of textual material in an aesthetic form on paper or some other media" (emphasis mine). Word simply hasn't got a clue when it comes to aesthetics.
A good example is line justification: Word (as far as I can tell) simply crams as many words on a line as possible (and most often even hyphenation isn't on, though this can arguably be blamed on the user). The extra space is put equally between the words and the last line of a paragraph is never justified. Latex, on the other hand, tries to find line breaks which look good on a whole, avoids hyphenating when not needed, adds more space after punctuation marks, and justifies the last line of the paragraph if it's almost as wide as the paragraph. Also for instance a consecutive f and i are combined into a ligature. Simply put: it looks better.
The total is a sum of many small things, that Word just doesn't even try to handle (at least by default, I doubt at all). I'm not saying that I know much about typography, but I sure can tell what looks good and what doesn't, and it sure as hell isn't rocket science.
I doubt, therefore I may be.
Nope! I'm a dumbass.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
... when's it being done for OpenOffice?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Many slashdotters know me online & in person: I speak at conferences & conventions. Gave about 20 paid talks in the past couple years.
But I'm free for a good audience. And I often volunteer to teach at high schools and colleges.
I've never used Powerpoint. Never will.
Powerpoint diverts the eyes of my audience. Steals their attention. Robs me of the joy of connecting with a listener.
And Powerpoint bores the audience. When was the last time you walked out of a meeting saying, "Wow, I really liked that pie chart!"
When I teach, I want to reach my students' heads, hearts, and hands. This means real physics - not simulations on a videoscreen. You're tightrope walking without a net - they see every goof: Once we measured c to be 2.3 x 10E8 m/sec. Another time, we misconnected the scintillator and measured the muon lifetime to be 5 microseconds (helluva a time dilation!).
Why are you behind the podium? To inform? Excite? Develop commitment, zeal, or curiosity? To get 'em to buy your product? Which do you want them to remember: special effects or your message? Pre-canned Powerpoint and animated Office FX clipart are three yawns better than an instructional videotape.
As Powerpoint undercuts public speaking, the natural result is that good speakers are in greater demand.
So go ahead and use Powerpoint - it's a great way to give a mediocre talk. You're making my job easier.
There are a few LaTeX packages designed to make creating PDF slideshow presentations easy.
Some of the examples I've seen are significantly better than PP, especially for engineering presentations. (Anything with formulas and graphs...)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I've downloaded and installed the demo. It is a plugin to powerpoint only.
Furthermore, it only works with the Windows version of PowerPoint. So it's very limited.
"Do the people who make Powerpoint presentations honetly think the sweeps and other effects look good? Because I've seen many presenters getting embarassed about the letter flying around the screen when they're trying to make a point."
They are handy when you're making a presentation in front of the Monty Python society.
I downloaded the free trial version and found a preferences section in OfficeFX where you can turn on anti-aliasing. Now the text looks great!
Did anyone notice that many of their demos are really just the DirectX SDK samles? This looks to me more like "glueing" together DirectX and some PowerPoint control and calling it "18 months ahead of the hardware". Anyone who's tried OpenGL or DirectX can get the same effects (without the powerpoint on top) in a couple hundred lines of code.
You are unclear on the basic concepts involved. A word processor is not a typesetting program, nor vice-versa.
While you're at it, please stop trying to open your mail with a screwdriver.
I write in my journal
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Does anyone remember Office Advantage from Metacreations? It was back when Metacreations hadn't sold all of its products.
As I recall, it offered a much better engine for rendering powerpoint slides, complete with drop shadows and improved anti-aliasing (bascially the look that Metacreations was famous for in its interfaces). As well as that, it added a heap of new transitions, like pond rippling between slides (I know sounds dicky, but the ripple was done at 25fps, so it looked really nice).
That was the single best thing I could use to make Powerpoint look instantly better.
Limited to Windows and Office users, now that is a limitation I'd like to have on my customer base.
Oh wait, I'd like to have a product that is limited to Linux and OpenOffice.org, imagine the millions of customers then...
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
enjoy!
MS word has been around since before 1985....
I always make powerpoint presentations look great on my 3GHz machine with 512MB of ram. I make sure to use the highest resolution possible for video and 24 bit bmp files and useless wav files that play at each transition. Then when my boss gives the presentation on his two year old laptop he looks like an idiot. It doesn't get any better than that!
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
Notepad is not Word is not QuarkXPress. You can complain that Quark doesn't have a spellchecker and you can't set anything on a page in a predictable manner in word and that Notepad doesn't have any image options until the cows come home as far as I'm concerned. I use text files out of notepad like postit notes, type up papers in word and use quark to make nifty looking posters and so forth. Although all the before mentioned programs deal with text, each is very different and the three should never come together in one app.
It looked like there were only a dozen or so templates. I know from experience that creating the 3D models to spin around that are also scale replica's of your product is a pain in the puck...
So even if you can change the base colors, contrast, and brightness on all of the motion elements, you will end up with some really great looking presentations, which look just like everyone else's who uses this tool.
So you end up being unique... just like everyone else.
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
I just watched the demo. Is it just me or did you find the "no-frills" presentation much easier to follow than the one with the idiotic 3D gears flying around? I'd take the simple, clear presentation any day.
That's all well and good if the movie is being written by people who know how to write, shot by people understand the camera in cinematography, acted by skilled actors, and just generally produced by trained professionals with a dedication to their craft and the skill to back it up.
I've sat through hundreds of Powerpoint presentations, most of them put on by people who were both dedicated to their craft and skilled in its practice, but with one intrinsic flaw: in not a single case was their craft the art of presentation or speaking. They were college professors (who are often excellent instructors, teachers, and quite knowledgeable about their subject, but not always excellent speakers) and middle managers, students and co-workers.
These are not people telling grand epics of breathtaking proportion to an audience yearning to be entertained and enthralled by their visual aids. Powerpoint easily affords and even encourages a lousy style of presentation and communication, by distracting the audience, by over-regimenting the content, and by substituting form for substance.
Flashiness is nice, and there are contexts where I'm sure it's appropriate (e. g. advertising). However, I don't go in to corporate meetings, and I didn't attend college lectures, so that I can, or could, be spun the charming tale of a manager and his pet project, or to have a textbook chapter split up into small bits. For the former, the public library or the nearest bookstore will have vastly more and more interesting material for the purposes of entertaining, and for the latter, I purchased the textbook once, I need not spend an hour being read off a screen what I can read off a page in the same time.
Canthros
1. You probably have little of interest to say in your presentation
2. You do not have enough to do at work because of the time it would need to create these presentations. 3. You wear a suit, like buzzwords and probably sell things.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Notepad is not Word is not QuarkXPress.
Of course there are different tools for different needs, but Word and Latex are meant to fulfill the same need - making articles, reports, books etc. They work with different design principles - Word is WYSIWYG, while in Latex you type the content and Latex formats it - but they're designed for the same thing. And when writing something, Latex simply makes it better looking.
Sure, there are problems with Latex, it doesn't interoperate as seamlessly(?) with other apps, and in some rare cases it can be a pain when Latex decides to place something stupidly, but on the whole, the outcome is much better looking that with Word.
I doubt, therefore I may be.
Line justification (outside of newspaper style narrow columns) is ugly and unreadable. Don't use it anywhere else unless misguided publishers absolutely require it.
Thanks. I wonder why that's not on by default? If you've got the vidcard to handle 3d lighting efftcts, etc., you can certainly handle anti-aliasing.
And it looks like crap without it.
everything in moderation