Four tools for non-linear presentations
Guidelines
Thousands of users sit through talks twiddling their thumbs while looking at bullet point parades against garish backgrounds. Four tools in the current test prove that presentations can be visually appealing, dynamic, and even exciting.
Most people listening to a lecture will not openly ask the heretical question: “Is he just using PowerPoint, or does he have a message?” However, it does reveal a dent in the market leader’s halo. The software isn’t necessarily to blame, even though it does tempt lecturers to create slides as cues, rather than underlining their message with meaningful visual information. It is more of a problem with the rigid format in PowerPoint, OpenOffice Impress, and the like, and it is always hard to keep track of a presentation with complex slides.
When an artist and a computer scientist got together in 2007 to define an alternative to dusty deserts of slides, they had no need to reinvent the wheel. Adam Somlai-Fischer and Peter Halacsy polished up the old kindergarten technique of wall collages by adding a clear guide line, and Prezi is their interactive presentation workspace for the browser. The platform-independent tool served as a template and inspiration for the other test candidates and is thus the first to enter the ring. From the rich choice of open source me-toos, the test team also picked the browser-based tools dizzy.js and impress.js, as well as the Inkscape add-on Sozi. All of our presentation experiments used Firefox 14.0.1 and Inkscape 0.48 on Linux Mint version 12.0 and Ubuntu 12.04, as well as Chromium 18.0 (only on Ubuntu 12.04).
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Direct Download
Read full article as PDF:
Price $2.95
News
-
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 Released
The latest release is focused on hybrid cloud.
-
Microsoft Releases a Linux-Based OS
The company is building a new IoT environment powered by Linux.
-
Solomon Hykes Leaves Docker
In a surprise move, Solomon Hykes, the creator of Docker has left the company.
-
Red Hat Celebrates 25th Anniversary with a New Code Portal
The company announces a GitHub page with links to source code for all its projects
-
Gnome 3.28 Released
The latest GNOME rolls out with better contact management and new features for handling virtual machines.
-
Install Firefox in a Snap on Linux
Mozilla has picked the Snap package system to deliver its application to Linux users.
-
OpenStack Queens Released
The new release comes with new features for mission critical workloads.
-
Kali Linux Comes to Windows
The Kali Linux developers even managed to run full blown XFCE desktop via WSL.
-
Ubuntu to Start Collecting Some Data with Ubuntu 18.04
It will be an ‘opt-out’ feature.
-
CNCF Illuminates Serverless Vision
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation announces a paper describing their model for a serverless ecosystem.