I overheard PG talking about this at Startup School and I have been looking forward to it since. I'm excited to hear they will be open sourcing their framework in the future..
I'd rather use Keynote. Sounds like the site was put together by people that don't actually do presentations. Are they aware just how crappy hotel/convention room Internet tends to be? The very last thing I want to do when standing in front of an audience is rely on resources that are not on my laptop.
The Obj-C to JS stuff is a neat gimmick though. It's cool and impresses the geek in me, but unless there is some bigger strategy to it (e.g., making the framework into a true Cocoa clone so desktop apps can be repurposed for the web) then I'm not sure if it's any better than just using existing frameworks (although I'm sure the programmers who did the site are much more proficient in Obj-C so it helps their efficiencies there).
They export to powerpoint so you can have your local copy as well as being able to give access to your attendees when they are on the net. I know google does this too but I am just saying it's not like they are trying to tie you into only having access to your presentation via their website.
Well, for one, 280 Slides is free. PowerPoint is far from it. More importantly, its really nice to use software that you don't have to install or download, and that gets automatically updated to the newest version. Plus, neither PowerPoint or Keynote lets you search the web for media directly.
Exactly. I'm being downmodded for my comment, but there's no real benefit to this but a lot of downsides. I can't control it with a remote. I can't easily run it full-screen. I can't easily add the types of high quality movies and pictures I'd expect presentations of mine to have. And to hell with export to PowerPoint. One, even if export is truly 1:1 with the original work (which I doubt, exports area always quirky at some level) I'd still need to jump into another program to do the presentation. Rather than downmodding comments like mine and yours, maybe they should actually chat with people that do presentations for a living instead of running with a "wouldn't it be cool if [fill in application] was made into a web app" train of thought like they seem to have. As I said, the programming looks very well done, I'm not mocking that aspect of this. But there are just far too many limitations to this.
So enough armchair critiquing, here's what might help this. Add export presentation functionality to Flash or QuickTime. Seriously. Both formats are relatively cross-platform, and would mean I could use a standalone player to launch the presentation full screen and not have to rely on Keynote/PowerPoint. Secondly, I know it's 2008 and we have Internet access via cellphone and wifi. But don't assume presenters will have access to a reliable, fast, connection. Maybe in 2015 I'll look back at my comment and laugh because fast wireless Internet access is near ubiquitous everywhere and my criticisms no longer apply. But my criticisms are born out of a sense of pragmatism. Never have I gone into a presentation assuming Internet access would work. At almost every conference there's at least a couple of presenters that get caught out because a site is down, the Internet connection is flaky, or about 50 people in the audience are blogging and saturating the bandwidth until it is slow as molasses.
Web apps are compelling for the same reasons that make web-based email so incredibly popular: no download/install process, and access to your data from any internet-connected computer.
For the past few years I've avoided anything having to do with Javascript. I just can't stand it. But I've always liked Objective-C (although how Brad "superdistribution" Cox ever thought it made sense to try and sell a proprietary compiler when g++ was free is beyond me but I digress).
If this thing really works and does a good job of encapsulating the browser-specific stuff, I'll definitely use it.
