impress.js may not help you if you have nothing interesting to say ;)"
Although said in jest, this struck me as poignant. I feel that many of us spend a disturbingly large amount of time researching, downloading and "hello world"ing all of these pretty well-marketed tools, but most of us still haven't figured out what we're going to build with them.
What you're doing is basically learning the tool, and its capabilities. Next time you need a CSS3 transformation plugin tailored for presentations, you'll be able to say "hey, I remember there's this impress thing that I tried once and it's exactly what we need".
I'm torn by Prezi. It's the moral antipode to Tufte's philosophy of presentation. It seems like it should be objectively evil. But the infinite canvas aspect of it makes the slides so dense they actually kind of work for reading online; the transition animations, annoying as they are, add pacing and create a reading experience that somewhat mirrors the delivery of an actual talk.
I'd love to hear some success stories from people who have actually delivered Prezi talks in public.
I haven't tried Prezi in public. But to me, the big opportunity in this for a well-organized presenter is the ability to spatially orient your audience.
I can imagine a history lecturer creating a timeline spanning the entire length of the course, marking major events on it. When he wants to discuss a topic, he zooms in on the timeline so that the students get both context and specificity.
I can imagine an elementary music teacher designing a presentation with instruments grouped by family, zooming in first on the woodwinds, then on the single reeds, then on the saxophones. When moving to a new family, it would zoom out first to remind the students of how the instruments relate to each other.
I can even imagine any routine three-point presentation could benefit from the added context that spatial reference can provide.
Animation for animation's sake would almost certainly be detrimental to a presentation. But I'm excited about tools like this because they give good presenters the opportunity to present information in a way that wasn't previously possible.
As a someone , who tortured with Prezi on academic level : While it's cool, - for the listeners - it's hard to follow, hard to take notes and hard to make connections between slides. It can make your product presentation bearable but if your goal is teach something to someone LaTeX, Ppt etc still beats it.
Wouldn't that depend on what you are trying to teach?
There is a reason why animation is used. It's not just to show off. It actually creates new opportunities to explain difficult concepts because you can show it in a continuum rather than as slides.
Look at what it did to Roslings presentation of stastistica data.
This 'zooming interface' type of presentation could be useful for mind maps, showing where some detailed concept fits in the grand scheme of things, examples above include the history time-line. I'd be heading for a mind map approach.
I agree with one poster above: for procedures a step by step approach is probably best.
Looks fantastic although I have to admit these prezi types of presentations start to give me a headache after about 10 seconds from the motion. Also while the prezis look undeniably cool, I still use the standard slideshows in that I find the transitions to be a little too much whiz-bang fancy where standard slides are minimalist. But this is a very cool demonstration of CSS transforms.
This is mind-blowing, I like how he uses transitions to empower content.
The transitions themselves are fantastic and like others in the thread I don't find them fancy at all, in fact I think they add movies like continuity to presentations for cheap, which if used wisely can enable story-telling style of information delivery.
I can see myself using it for info-graphics and tutorials, other than presentations, by making it do non-linear (zooming in/out or using hrefs) flow of content.
Oh now I realize why I liked it so much, it also removes the single most annoying feature of reading content on the web - the constant scrolling and zooming, like readability it alleviates that pain for you, by zooming in to the content that matters the most at this instant.
I have a friend who gets paid to simply make Prezis for clients (large and small). The tool was designed for anyone to use and yet she still gets plenty of business.
There is a gigantic market for making stuff that makes other people look good. People are looking for something that is like Powerpoint, but a bit better because PP is considered boring. This, if refined and made easier to use for intermediary content creators, has enormous financial potential because it works on all devices.
There's an inkscape extension Sozi http://sozi.baierouge.fr/wiki/en:welcome which is also very easy to use tool to make prezi like presentation and it's also FOSS.
I've used Sozi once before and it's pretty impressive for what it is and far easier to use than the tool we're discussing here - mainly because Inkscape is so cool.
While technically true, it isn't going to be easy to produce a general presentation for that code. There are a number of hardcoded x/y cords and specialized css classes ("<span class="have">have</span> <span class="you">you</span> <span class="noticed">noticed</span> <span class="its">it's</span> <span class="in">in</span>")
What I'd love to see is a way for me to write relatively vanilla HTML, possibly run it through a parser (in a perfect world, I would just annotate it with css classes) and out comes a sexy presentation. Or maybe a wysiwyg UI, like how Prezi's interface works.
Probably it's not stated clear enough (it's a very early release and I wasn't expecting such a buzz around it) that impress.js is meant to be responsible only of positioning the step elements (based on data attributes) and animating between them.
Anything that is on a step is custom HTML and CSS and author is expected to write it. Stylesheet given is not meant to be a part of a library - it's just a demo.
I know that it narrows the target users to people knowing HTML and CSS (on a quite good level) but it's just an experiment and a tool I use. If anyone finds it nice and helpful that's great. If not - it's not my fault.
But for sure some detailed docs for impress.js are needed and I hope to write them soon.
Right, but many good presentations are mostly pictures. The Yoda picture in this demo turns out to encoded in the html in an ugly way. There definitely needs to be a tool that lets the writer work at a higher level than that.
Impress.js is an awesome piece of tech—but I wouldn't use it for a presentation:
There's just a very fine line between over- and underdoing a presentation. It's never good just to dash off a presentation with lousy layout and design but it may not be beneficial to overdo a presentation as well. Too much FX and animations makes you at a certain point needy: "Look what I did to impress you", "Look, another animation!", "How nice, isn't it??", "And here another 3D effect, awesome isn't it? I spent the entire day to make the rotation perfect, just for you because I like you!". After the 5th animation the viewers think you are a needy guy, needing approval, spending to much time on design than content and having nothing to do.
Different with pure web presentations for a large audience, then such tools are nice, but I don't know if they convert better than a gold old landing page.
There's a tool that does 3D presentations called Tao Presentations, just around the corner. See http://www.taodyne.com. It also does "real" 3D (i.e. stereoscopy or auto-stereoscopy on Philips or Alioscopy screens).
The description of slides looks close to what you are calling for:
slide "test",
* "First point"
* "Second point"
It doesn't output to Impress.js yet, but that sounds like an interesting opportunity.
I bet it would be fairly easy to plug this into org-mode. It already supports exporting to web-based presentation tools (I forget exactly which ones) so it's not without precedent. The tricky bit would be encoding the positions and transitions and effects, but that shouldn't be impossible.
The developer should explain the concept behind the document/view. Is there a fixed document and then a view path/graph? I would be interested to know what the conceptual model is.
I love this new format for presentations. I think the fact that slides are arranged in a spatially distinct way - and are linked fluidly - aids my comprehension. Would be interesting to find out if this is actually true (and not just expectation based upon novelty appeal).
Yesterday was the first day I'd blocked Hacker News to get work done, ironically it was the moment when I needed something like this the most. Oh well, seems really cool. I'm glad the flash, closed alternative Prezi has a rival as this seems far more responsive.
In looking at the stylesheet for the impress.js demo, I wonder if this http://leaverou.github.com/prefixfree/ would be useful to keep things tidy when rotating content and such.
I'm actually a little surprised that no one has mentioned reveal.js yet. Different idea, but worth mentioning. Impress.js is more like those font animation we see lots these days. It's pretty cool.
It was mentioned on HN (I started using it after spotting it on main page). Reveal.js is more practical for daily usage at the moment - basic HTML convention lets you work with it. But I'd prefer two separate stylesheets - the basics and a theme.
Seems my poor intel gpu doesn't work well with webgl. I got really narrow z-culling, every 3d flipped text disappear behind a cute intersection triangle, but that's off topic; I didn't know prezzi, and seeing this kind of things live is refreshingly fun.
It's funny how (to me, at least) the Impress.js deck works, but the Coca-cola one doesn't. Not just a matter of duration, there's something in the animation. Maybe it's the little things like the way the Impress.js animation emphasises the word "tiny" - the transitions add meaning. Whereas the Coca-cola transitions don't seem to say anything extra.
excellent tool. For content creation it could be coupled with some markdown tool written in javascript.
I have been using this approach for a while, I put the content in a textarea and the browser does the conversion for you. The formatting instructions (to apply css styles) are similar to LaTeX which i am familiar with and is not too visually intrusive.
It run great on Firefox 10 on Win and Mac because they have hardware acceleration. Firefox 10 on my Ubuntu doesn't do hardware acceleration so even that it supports CSS 3D animations are slow as hell.
Microsoft also works hard on hardware acceleration in IE10, so it will probably run just fine there, whenever it will be released.
It's true, that being 'webkit-only' feels like good ol' IE-only sites. But that's a cost that you need pay to play with edge web technologies.
Thanks for getting back. Note that I _do_ consider the project cool and well - I know it works in FF 10, I tried. :)
I really just don't like to see the next gap in browser support and hate to see 'support everything but IE 6' turn into 'support nothing but the latest chrome'.
This is nothing against your project, in fact I think for this particular experiment you _had_ to push the requirements up.
Simply the interest about this project is far more bigger than I could expect and more and more people are confused about the browser support in it. And it really is confusing because today it's webkit-only. Firefox 10 is around the corner, but not just there yet, and Firefox 9 users may feel like they are excluded: "hey, I have latest Firefox, Y U NO WORK!?" ;)
Is it? I think all that means is: "Your browser should support hardware accelerated CSS3 and have a fast Javascript VM". Isn't the standards-centric view pretty much the opposite of the browser-centric one?
The project already said what you suggest, in fact several times.
Roughly:
"It's a presentation framework based on the power of CSS3 transforms and transitions in modern browsers and inspired by the idea behind prezi.com."
More or less exactly what you said:
"Impress.js is developed with current webkit-based browsers in mind (Chrome, Safari), but should work also in other browsers supporting CSS3 3D transforms and transitions (Firefox, IE10)."
It even says it is tested with nightly builds of Firefox and _then_ came up with the previously quoted:
"I don't really expect it to run smoothly in non-webkit-based browser."
At this point the requirements are already defined, the tested browser setups are listed. This is just surprising insofar as that
- the text before says that Firefox Aurora is tested as well (I've to admit I missed that reading the explanation the first time)
- this (and that was my real point) becomes a ~standard~ disclaimer by now. Chrome it is, the rest be damned. I think that's sad and still stand by my comparison to 'IE optimization' for things like this.
Your comment is self-absorbed, unhelpful, and wrong.
I, for one, have long been looking for an easier way to prototype and test 3D interfaces for multidimensional data. It's hard to get meaningful feedback on a movie or a SketchUp model, and this tool may just fit the bill.
from technical point of view they do support it (when it comes to iPhone/iPad and newest Android) the problem may be a performance and different way of positioning things on the screen
but I'd really like to see in running on iPad, maybe on Android tablets if possible, it's just not implemented yet
impress.js may not help you if you have nothing interesting to say ;)"
Although said in jest, this struck me as poignant. I feel that many of us spend a disturbingly large amount of time researching, downloading and "hello world"ing all of these pretty well-marketed tools, but most of us still haven't figured out what we're going to build with them.
Opiate for the hackers. I plead guilty.