While this is truly, ahem, impressive, I sure hope a real presentation doesn't involve nearly as many dizzying rotations. When attempting to convey an idea, animations should be subtle, or the idea gets lost in the pretty effects.
I tend to agree. I have tried using impress to create presentations that were spatial, focusing less on the dizzying animations and more on the actual content... But Impress isn't set up for it. Impress is really designed to move the camera about a scene and moving the camera is the only operation it supports well.
You'll notice the user examples from that wiki are mostly the same basic idea... because it's quite difficult to make something more complex with impress out of the box. YOu can see a few pull requests that try to make this easier, like the one that supports subslides (i.e. a slide transition that doesn't cause a camera movement).
I think the only place for these presentations is where you're not physically giving the talk. In most cases, simple cuts or dissolves between slides is fine, since like you said, none of this actually adds much to the presentation.
It's a framework for creating presentations and what's linked here is only a demo for showing the functionality. If you want to see real life (yeah, "real life") demos, look under "Presentations" on this page: https://github.com/bartaz/impress.js/wiki/Examples-and-demos
I really strongly suggest you find a use for it that is not presentation. When I'm presenting I want people to be listening to what I'm saying, or getting information of the slide (or from their handouts); I don't want them thinking "Hey, that's a nice transition, I can't do that in powerpoint, I wonder what they used; wait, did he just say 27% up or 27% late? Wow, what was that group for?" etc.
I liked the way it told me after a few seconds that I needed to use arrows or the space bar. And it kept the back-button functionality.
Yup, the 'messages in the comments' aspect reminded me of the early days in mid to late 1990s.
I will get round to doing a mind map in this. A 'run time' steerable navigation mode would be great (I tend to do 'random walks' while teaching, and I use slide sorter view a lot during lessons).
Very nice. Although at first, I didn't realize the slideshow kept going after the 3rd slide. It looked like it ended. It was only out of curiosity that I used the right arrow key and saw the whole sliding effect. Maybe make a note of that on the 3rd slide.
I didn't hear about reveal.js. I was considering impress.js (I've known this tool for some time already) as a tool to make my next presentation but I think reveal is better choice in my situation (I think it's easier to use and has everything I need). Thanks for the link!
Slidery is a Java based project which allows to write presentations in markdown and generate slides in Impress.js and a bunch of other javascript presentation frameworks.
Seems a lot of people (based on the comments) have written presentation generators :) Here's my contribution [1]. I created it to whip up quick slideshows for my club presentations on campus.
The only thing I hate about pages like this is that they hijack the browser with their fake history. When I press the back button from this page I want to go back to your homepage, or back to HN. I don't want to have to click it 20 times to get back to where I was. Playing the presentation in reverse doesn't even make sense so it's not a use case you should design for.
I think this presentation/page isn't simple enough. You use too much different fonts and styles (there are slides with regular, bold and italics style in one sentence). I liked the rocket-shape of presentation though. It's just my opinion, I'm not an expert.
Nice, but it feels like jmpressjs is actually somewhat restrictive compared to impress, am I right? jmpressjs feels more slide-oriented, whereas impress is more like prezi - position it yourself wherever you like in 2D space.. is this correct?
A better page of examples (user-contributed) is here: https://github.com/bartaz/impress.js/wiki/Examples-and-demos