I just noticed SlideRocket on ReadWriteWeb. SlideRocket is an online presentation application built on Adobe’s Flex platform. I got in on the limited Beta and this looks like a very promising app!
SlideRocket has everything you’d expect from a presentation app — powerful slide and presentation authoring tools, pretty transitions and image and video manipulations and animations, charting and table creation, and the ability to import PowerPoint files (export is coming soon). It also has some features you wouldn’t necessarily expect in an online application, like the ability to import your own fonts, a plugin architecture that will allow third-parties to create their own transitions and effects, and an offline Adobe AIR-based player (a full AIR-based version of the editor is also planned).
But where SlideRocket really shines it in its approach to community, sharing, and collaboration. Already active in the application is the concept of an asset library, where you can pull in assets (images, video, etc.) from any source, as well as directly from the web. Right now, SlideRocket searches Flickr and Yahoo! Images from inside the app and can add images it finds to the user’s asset library. (link)
Sign up for the limited Beta here.
PowerPoint has been dead a long time. I was at the funeral in 2001.
Yet maybe it is time ti stop thinking in the slide deck metaphor of communication, but don’t ask me exactly what that should be.
Alan is correct. Sometimes I think I’m living in a time warp. When will people learn. It matters not, what app they use….it’s the message they convey and whether it is effective or not. Slide Rocket has some benefits for an accomplished visual media producer but for most their stories/presentations and message will be just as bland as it is/was with Powerpoint or any other presentation applicaiton.
The good news is, no presentation application can replace a creative mind.
The last point might be great and save time : sharing data, browsing ans importing images directly from websites like flickr. With powerpoint, or similar aps, it takes time to go look for images, then catch the high resolution -if it exists- , then download, then import…. boring.
Powerpoint or anything else is just a tool, you might use in a great or very bad way. Slide Rocket seems more effective, no more.