Nice try Google, you should have bought SlideRocket
Summary: Today is not a good day for Microsoft Office. Google released their underwhelming-yet-much-anticipated PowerPoint killer today, Presently.
Today is not a good day for Microsoft Office. Google released their underwhelming-yet-much-anticipated PowerPoint killer today, Presently. I checked it out but it doesn't hold a candle to SlideRocket (ZDNet Gallery), a presentation application built by Mitch Grasso using Flex and Amazon's S3. One of the reasons that I like SlideRocket is because it not only has a great interface but it also allows you to create very rich presentations. That's one of the reasons I've been so excited to see what Electric Rain is doing with StandOut.
SlideRocket has all of your typical slide show features but also incorporates things that Flash does really well. You can embed a Flash object right into a presentation to add some rich animation or transition. The charting features of SlideRocket are also very impressive because they're using the Charting components from Flex. You can quickly and easily embed very meaningful data visualization assets into your slides. Because it's Flash, you can embed Flash video into your presentations and also embed the finished presentation into a blog or other page to tap into the viral element.
You can keep assets in a library as well as pull them from outside, web based sources like Flickr. There's also a budding plugin feature so developers can add packaged functionality to the slides. The only plugin available right now is a quote plugin that lets you search for quotes and add them to your presentation. I think this could end up being a great feature as the product grows. Since SlideRocket is built on Flex, they created an AIR version for it that allows you to work with and view your presentations online.
The company is a small startup that has been working on the application for a little over a year. They plan some enterprise features including Salesforce integration, versioning and statistics tracking in the near future. Currently you can do a couple of helpful things including slide-level sharing across presentations which allow you to have a central side that can be updated for everyone using it; a great feature for updating statistics. This is a very, very powerful application and it looks even better when compared to what's on the market now. It's currently in private beta but with a release planned around November.
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Talkback
Pretty, I guess
Google, at least, has a defined set of features including file import an export. If all I want is a Flash generator, there are plenty of others.
RE: Pretty, I guess
Priorities
So you're saying that fundamental issues like file-level compatibility are being left until later, but the cosmetic "features" are there from the beginning?
Sounds to me like a car with a plush interior and great styling, but without a drive train, suspension, or brakes.
RE: Priorities
RE:Priorities
The 'TV ad' on our website is a product tour created in SlideRocket that describes some of the current functionality. If there is something you feel is missing from our feature-set, please feel free to post in our forum.
Good Luck!
Feature set
Specifications would be a good start, assuming you have any.
In the mean time, I'm precisely as impressed by your "TV ad" as I am by anyone showing my a flashy TV ad who doesn't have any hard data on the product. Even a Yugo can look great on television.
RE: Feature Set
Selection criteria
Why would I bother doing an evaluation of something that doesn't even have a simple feature summary?
Do you normally order and taste everything on the menu without reading the description?
Evaluating software is time- and labor-intensive. Spending that time and labor to dig around trying to find required functions is, bluntly, stupid. If the manufacturers don't even have objective specifications, they're asking me to spend a large amount of my time on something that has such low quality prospects that there's no serious reason to do so.
Bad Analogy
no, but I would be expected to have tasted the food before I comment on how good it is.
Beyond that, everyone knows that specs don't really mean as much as you think it does, they are usually over emphasized and without real life practice, specs don't mean much.
If, you are saying that Google's offering is better simply because they printed their specs, then you, are, bluntly, stupid. Did you waste your time testing out Google's software? or are you just saying that SlideRocket is unacceptable because they didn't post specs for a software that is still in beta, and therefore specs and limitations are not finalized yet?
I simply don't see your point here. Why did you feel it necessary to come here just to talk about something you are clearly uninformed and ignorant about. You should go over to the site and read a bit beyond the home page. Research is worth the time spent to learn about software. I hope you don't purchase all of your software based purely on printed specs
RE: Nice try Google, you should have bought SlideRocket