SlideRocket is pretty nifty.  But I hate the name.  Now that slides are totally obsolete—not only have they not been used for presentations for about 15 years, but you also pretty much can’t get a roll of slides developed without paying in blood—why keep the slide name associated with a presentation package.  Frankly, my mental image is when the kids put their old plastic slide in the wading pool and go rocketing down their home made water slide.

But name aside, sliderocket looks to be a good app.  There are of course plenty of bugs and glitches, and I’m not too sold on the whole software as a service thing, where network latency causes you to hit “save” a million times with no apparent effect.  But the software itself puts together decent presentations.  I do not like the wysiwyg paradigm, and much prefer the LaTeX/Beamer/Tikz/PGF approach to developing presentations, but when you have to place nicely with others, that usually means power-point-alike.

What I like about slide rocket so far is that it is half a step more towards the separation of content and format than power point proper.  For example, putting shadows on a character isn’t a property of the font, but rather an effect, drop shadow, that is applied to an object (in my case, text).  And it’s also half a step closer to the final product than power point proper.  My target is a website, not a presentation in a room, and slide rocket is a web app.  So the preview button pretty much is exactly what the final product will look like.  No need to fiddle about with Adobe Presenter to mung the “slides” into a flash movie.

Ah, one further point, a Chinese co-worker thought that “slides” was actually “slices”  so he would say “on the next slice you can see …”  I explained that the word was really slide (I was editing audio he generated), but we both agreed that slice probably makes more sense.  So how about SliceRocket.

Update:  SlideRocket went commercial too soon for me and my Linux platform.  Many of the bugs I reported were chalked up to “Flash not well supported under Linux” and subsequently ignored in the commercial release.  I like SlideRocket, but not nearly enough to ditch LaTeX/Beamer/PGF/pdf and actually *pay* for something closed source and broken.

I’m gathering information on presentation styles and strategies, as apparently I’m out of practice.  Guy Kawasaki in his podcast on pitching made a mention that propellerheads go in at the ground level.  That’d be me.

On the other hand, I have good vision of what I would like to see in a presentation, especially an overview, but the hours and resources needed to make the visions work aren’t there.

Maybe if I can use perl; LaTeX, or JavaScript, I could make more progress putting images together coherently.  But powerpoint is just too limiting.

I’ve looked at Haxe, but am not ready to dive into that just yet.