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Animated Presentations Using SVG
Inspired by work on work on non-traditional presentations in KDE's Karbon (part of Calligra), Aditya Bhatt set out to create a purely client-side tool for creating animated presentations in the browser. Based upon svg-edit and using Sozi, the initial results are pretty cool. His weblog post documents the process — the choice of SVG versus html5's canvas, Javascript instead of SMIL, etc. highlighting the challenges faced even today with different browsers offering wildly different levels of support for each web technology. The sourcecode for Awwation can be had over at Github.
...people would forget everything you said, then spend the next month asking how to make PowerPoint do that.
if in doubt blame the browser, but i see a change between frames #1 and #2 and then it gets 'stuck' and no more changes are seen. Firefox 14.0a1 "nightly" ("well y'see thars yer problem right char")
but if you have nothing to say, it doesn't matter how you present it! Just kidding, but how do you share handouts with these tools...
Sig?
Animation is something that should be used minimally in presentations, if even at all. I have seen very few presentations where the animations were to anyone's benefit.
This (and Prezi) totally make me motion-sick. I hope this fad passes quickly.
...depending on your browser, OS and graphics.
On my 8 year old thinkpad, the animations are pretty jerky on both chrome and firefox, but firefox's font is wrong. On a recent dell, the animations are nice and smooth, but the writing is unreadable on chrome, and some words are missing on firefox.
I really like the idea of this, and if you ignore the flashy presentations above, you could see how it might be useful to present an overview of something complex, but requiring discussion of certain parts of it in detail. However, I also agree that 'flashiness' needs to be avoided in presentations (NB flashiness is the better of the two evils when compared with speakers using their slides as their own notes).
The best presentations I've seen have come as a well thought-through narrative from the speaker, with graphics there only to illustrate their points.
Animation felt choppy to me, then again its loading the page over and over again. Animated SVG does look cool when done properly.
It's really cool and I really, really like SVG, but byt slide 10 it had eaten all of my memory. Probably a memory leak/dodgy implementation in FF.
All it needs is some lens-flare.
I think this is a very cool way to do presentations, and I can totally picture it for parts, where you have to show where different parts of the presentation falls (like on the map, road, progress or a flowchart).
All those guys that are saying that it is not to a benefit to do a presentation in this manner (cross platform compatible!), can keep their boring presentations and sleep while they are watching them! I will be definitely looking to create my new presentations in this manner, especially if they have to be a web based!!!
How about this technology for a browser presentation:
- A small CSS file.
- Some pages of HTML containing the text.
Take out the CSS, and you could get Mosaic to do it.
So, how does that sound?
I got a kick out of how the only thing that wasn't a vector was the SVG logo itself. Hah!
impress.js. It isn't SVG/canvas, but it uses CSS3 and javascript to make prezi-like presentations using simple html. It's actually quite easy to use. I've been having a bit of fun with it lately.
Inkscape + jessyink (which is nowadays included by default in inkscape) has been doing this for several years.
Strange, there are so few svg animation programs? Ktoon appears unsupported, Synfig has no importer for svg files and an addon for Inkscape still is in the making... Sad.
for Clippy?
I have an animated SVG presentation of a cave strucure here.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Animated SVG have been around for a while. Check out this clock.
Don't stop where the ink does.
I get further along, but it deterministically crashes X just as it says "you can zoom".
(Firefox 11, X.Org X Server 1.10.1, Ubuntu 11.04, intel video card)
Brings back memories of the '90s. Nice.
It's neat and reminds me of Scott McCloud's comics.
FWIW around 1995 or 1997 I made a 3D interactive presentation on an SGI machine with an early VRML viewer, Cosmo IIRC.
By placing photographs in different orientations in a 3D space, clicking on each would send the user on a spinning arc that ended with the next image in sequence being displayed in proper orientation. Going to the next image would involve backflips, twists, sliding across the stars.
Anyway, I was just thinking that Sozi is cool and makes beautiful images, and wondered if there is a way to extend it to 3D or n-D. A simple example would be to zoom in on a planetary surface, or facets of the interior of a home (a mind museum) zooming in on panels or flipping to pages in books in a library, or frames in a film. Seems like an n-D sozi would be a nice interface to the web even.
Synfig (http://www.synfig.org/) has an importer for svg files!
It has been around since a few subreleases. Just right-click on the workspace.
Nice to see!