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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."
It's hard for me to look at their product. Their site doesn't seem to work in Firefox.
...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
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?
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..."
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
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.
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.
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.