Sliderocket: The Last Stage Of Jettisoning Desktop Office Apps

Over the past few years I have moved pretty steadily to a web O/S model of operations. I jumped on Gmail early, Google maps, and last, Google calendar and tasks. Blog editing has always been a browser-based experience for me. One by one, everything seemed to levitate to the cloud.

I used Basecamp and Backpack episodically and reluctantly for years, and 90% of that sort of collaboration is now being accomplished by other web-based tools, largely based on what my partners have selected. [PS I am involved in research this summer called Microstreams in Business, which will look at the rise of apps like Yammer, Socialtext Signals, Socialcast, Threadbox, Jive, Newsgator, and IBM Connections.]

Even Microsoft Word gets no play on my desktop (although I haven’t deleted it), as I don’t need to generate documents of that sort often, and if I did, I would use Google Docs or one of its competitors. Same with Excel.

But Powerpoint has become the last desktop app that I have stuck with. Perhaps it’s because it’s unlike other Microsoft office products that grew bloated and unwieldy. Maybe its because I know it so well. Maybe its because I never found Keynote to be that interesting a replacement: just a different desktop tool, and one that I didn’t know very well. Maybe it’s because I have dozens of .ppt files, and I scavenge from one to make another. Or maybe no one had built a web app that was sufficiently advanced to serve my (relatively modest) needs.

Enter Sliderocket

I first tried Sliderocket when it became available, a few years ago now. I ran into some issues that were showstoppers for me: bad conversion from powerpoint, and no way to make text boxes both filled and semi-transparent, which is a hallmark of my preso style. So I gave it a pass, and went back to Powerpoint.

A few months ago I heard about the addition of a plugin model to Sliderocket, including a Twitter capability, so I decided to take another look. I believe that Sliderocket can definitely fill the bill for me now, and offers some capabilities — linked to it being a web app — that make it siginificantly more attractive that Powerpoint (or Keynote). Although it still has some glitches that are painful, and need to be addressed.

First, let me describe the lifecycle of my presentations.

I do a lot of presenting. In 2009, I spoke over 18 times in the US and Europe. So it is fair to say a spend a reasonably amount of time working on slide decks, and standing up in public presenting. Others do a lot more remote presenting than I do, although I have plans for various briefings and webinars, and that was one of the motivations leading me to take another look at web-based solutions.

My slide style is generally an image with a text box layered above, where the text box is semi transparent, like this:

[The hard to see text at the lower right is the URL of this creative commons licensed image, from Flickr.]

Occasionally I create a table, or some simple diagrams, but not to any great extent. Mostly it’s like a comic strip, except the image is evocative of what I am talking about, instead of representing a scene from a narrative.

I often make notes in Powerpoint, and I like to be able to see them. This can lead to problems logisitically, where Powerpoint is running on a machine backstage, and there isn’t a separate monitor for me to look at the notes while presenting. So for a number of reasons, I have moved ot a model where I print the notes out, or write them elsewhere.

When presenting, I do not go for dissolves and swooping letters, or any other the nausea-inducing pyrotechnics that Powerpoint can cause. I also don’t generally time my slides, which occasionally means I go longer than planned, but I would rather overshoot than be herded by a time estimate. I just go from slide to slide until I am finished.

I’ve wanted to be able to embed Twitter and other participative bits in my presos, and have experimented with ways to do that. Years ago, Gregarious Narain and I dreamed up an app called Front Channel, intended to provide a smart way to integrate Twitter into live presentations, and Greg prototyped it for a talk we did called ‘Short Attention Span Theater’ at Web 2.0. We used it for bringing in the tweets from the whole group:

Last year, I took a long look at Sliderocket, which is a web-based replacement for Powerpoint. There were a number of issues that stopped me from adopting the tool — like not completely or correctly importing my Powerpoint decks — so after a short look, I decided to stick with Powerpoint.

A few weeks ago, I took another look, and Sliderocket seems to be ready for use.

First of all, the import issue I had in the past seems to have been fixed — at least with the features of Powerpoint that I use.

Sliderocket is very attractive tool, and with a high speed connection runs as quickly — for all intents and purposes — as a desktop presentation tool.

I won’t go into a feature-by-feature examination of the tool comparing it to Powerpoint; I will simply note a few features that don’t work as I would like, and a handful of capabilities that make it very interesting on the actual presentation side.

Let’s start with the negatives.

Notes — Notes pages aren’t really supported like they are in Powerpoint. While you can create notes and edit them, there is no way to see notes when presenting, and no way to print them, even when the presentations are exported.

Flash - The app is completely based on Flash, so I can’t see a good path forward on iPad and other Apple mobile devices. although all I have so far is an iPhone. I have been informed by the folks at Sliderocket that they are planning some sort of export and apps for these devices that will not rely on Flash, at least for showing presentations. But these are all in the future right now.

The positives are pretty compelling:

Presentations — Sliderocket supports direct presentations in the browser — in those circumstances when the Internet at a conference is reliable — as well as the ability to download the presentation in an offline-playable format (if you have the Business level of the service or higher).

Here’s the browser-based presentation. although why it says ‘preview’ I don’t know.

The fullscreen capability works as you’d expect, and the controls work as normal.

There is the ability to export an executable presentation — not editable — which plays on the desktop in a more-or-less exact analong of the online version, although it seems that some plugins don’t work in this downloaded context.

Slide Library — I do share slides across different presentations, but I haven’t worked enough with Sliderocket to have gained any great insight into the way that their slide library works. In principle it could be great.

Published Presentations/Webinars — I have not yet tried using Sliderocket for publishing presentations, or for webinars, but the fact that I can do so, without using other external services is very attractive. I am planning a (much delayed) webinar series this summer, and I plan to give Sliderocket a try.

Media Types and Plug-ins — Sliderocket supports a bunch of rich data types — video, tables, charts, shapes — and also has a plug-in architecture. One of the plug-ins that interests me is a poll capability from Poll Anywhere. Users can phone in their responses using text messaging. This does not appear to work in the exported desktop presentations, however.

There is also a Twitter plug-in that supports the display of a search result — like ‘stoweboyd’ — in the slide presentation. This seems to work in both the desktop and online presentation. While this doesn’t have the controls that @gregarious and I envisioned in the Front Channel app — like support for multiple panelists and the attendees — it could be workable as a general case.

Conclusions

I have had only the briefest experience with Sliderocket, so far. I used the exported presentation approach for the talk I gave recently in in Berlin, at Next10, and it went off without a hitch. In the coming weeks I plan to try the webinar capability, as well as other plugins. I will have more to say then, but I am interested in getting my presentations off my hard drive and up into the cloud in a form that can actually replace what I have been doing for the past ten years with Powerpoint. More to follow.