Have you tried SlideRocket yet? It's a web-based slide creation and presentation package. For all of you Windows OS users who are jealous of the Apple Keynote presentations you may have seen (slick transitions, very crisp photos, effects, text) or who are tying to move to an "Office 2.0" (all your "office" applications on the web), you really need to give SlideRocket a try.
That said, while I'm talking it up, let me provide some quick commentary on their OFFLINE capability. It's a separate AIR-based (Adobe) application, that allows you to then download/cache any presentations that you might want to present while disconnected - such as when buried in the bowels of a conference center with non-existent wifi (not that that scenario has happened to me).
I'm in a usability frame of mind lately - as I've been going through and revamping some materials on findability, ECM, search, portals, information architecture, and yes, usability in and of itself.
I've labeled my commentary on the graphic here - but in short, sometimes the "stripped down" (simple) interface is perhaps a bit TOO little.
Why not make it clear which presentation I'm caching?
Why not show how much of the total presentation is left to cache? Percentage at the least, # of megabytes? And I'm not sure if the graphic listed as being downloaded here was actually named "d72322e9-5e5f-43b2-8569-0a6b03807839.jpg" or that's an internally generated filename, but in either case... uh... WHAT file is that? How about what slide # it is from? Or a tiny preview? Or something that would be useful at any rate.
Would any of this prevent me or anyone else from using the product? Probably not. But in an otherwise very slick experience, this just seems to me that it needs a bit more attention to detail - and none of it would take that much effort to do.
Your thoughts? Are you using SlideRocket, or similar web-based options? Let me know what your experiences are, and perhaps we can help steer the ship a bit as it blasts off.
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