I hate all "presentation" software. But presentations are a necessary evil for most of us at times. My rebellion used to lead me to creating a lightly formatted, bulleted text file; but too many PHBs complained about this "style". Still I refuse to lock up my content in some unsearchable, unusable binary format that no one will ever find. I agree that the best presentations often have no slides, but the problem is that there is no way to recover the content in those presentations unless they are recorded (whether A/V or text). So videos like those on Google-talk are okay since they're repeatable, mostly lossless, and widely available (though not searchable). But most often with presentations too much information is lost (even if is buried somewhere in "speaker notes"), and the audiences are small.
I tend to find that the best technical presentations (chickens) are based on white-papers (eggs). So that's the place to start preparing the content. It's going from the white-paper to the presentation that's painful. I use wikis for most content creation these days, so it makes sense to be able make a useful informational page (like a white-paper) double as a presentation. So far I've had pretty good success with MoinMoin's SinglePageSlideShow . The speaker notes are implemented in an unreleased version, but it looks promising. I love being able to keep all the benefits of wiki (light-weight, searchable, etc) as part of a presentation.
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I hate all "presentation" software. But presentations are a necessary evil for most of us at times. My rebellion used to lead me to creating a lightly formatted, bulleted text file; but too many PHBs complained about this "style". Still I refuse to lock up my content in some unsearchable, unusable binary format that no one will ever find. I agree that the best presentations often have no slides, but the problem is that there is no way to recover the content in those presentations unless they are recorded (whether A/V or text). So videos like those on Google-talk are okay since they're repeatable, mostly lossless, and widely available (though not searchable). But most often with presentations too much information is lost (even if is buried somewhere in "speaker notes"), and the audiences are small.
I tend to find that the best technical presentations (chickens) are based on white-papers (eggs). So that's the place to start preparing the content. It's going from the white-paper to the presentation that's painful. I use wikis for most content creation these days, so it makes sense to be able make a useful informational page (like a white-paper) double as a presentation. So far I've had pretty good success with MoinMoin's SinglePageSlideShow . The speaker notes are implemented in an unreleased version, but it looks promising. I love being able to keep all the benefits of wiki (light-weight, searchable, etc) as part of a presentation.