Prezi – first impressions post Oz-IA 2009

Delivering the keynote at this years Oz-IA was the first time I’ve used Prezi. If you’ve not heard of Prezi, it’s is a new online presentation and mind-mapping product that they call the ‘zooming presentation editor’. It runs in a browser, but you can download a desktop version that is powered by Adobe Air so it will work on both Mac and PC. A friend at ISKO Conference suggested I use it and then I saw a colleague use it at BA World Symopsium. It looked like an interesting tool to use so I thought I would just give it a try.

Learning to use Prezi

Prezi was pretty easy to use and learning the basics only took me about an hour. Unfortunately, learning how to best resize things, place them, add images, and then tell Prezi to follow a specific path, and make it all look good, took me about a week.

Prezi uses a unique interface that sits in the top left of the window and rotates and zooms to the item you select. Because you can always see all the options identifying what feature to select is pretty easy, rather than having to delve into a deep navigation structure like Photoshop (I still get lost in its navigation even after some 10 years of using it). By simply selecting the ‘place’ icon you can move, resize, and rotate it with ease with your mouse. When the presentation comes to that item, or when you select it, Prezi will automatically zoom to fit that shape to its window. Obviously, learning the right size is critical because you don’t want to give people motion sickness with all the zooming in and out and around the presentation.

The good

• When done well it looks awesome! It certainly made the right impact in delivering the keynote. The very first question someone asked me was ‘what software did you use’?
• It has undo!
• It doesn’t take long to use, but it takes a week of use before you’ve got the nack of making it look great
• There are a few templates to start you off with colours, fonts, and three levels of headings

The bad

• It can look a bit gimmicky
• There are only a few, non-editable, templates — I’d like more please or at least the ability to make my own and then edit/modify the headings, fonts, and colours
• You can’t group objects, so moving around a collection of objects and then re-sizing them is a terribly painful manual process
• You can’t create your own template or clone a presentation, so you’ve always got to start from scratch
• Once you’ve got an object — a pic or a video — inside Prezi there’s no way to export it to use it elsewhere
• You can only embed swf or fla video files — this meant I not only had to edit my file and export it as divx or wma (which is what my normal working and production files end up as), but then find a tool that would convert it into an fla. Sure, YouTube uses fla, but given how widely divx is now used I was surprised it wasn’t supported 
• It crashed on ‘undo’ once the filesize got to around 80MB (by then I had embedded about 3 videos)
• Resolution of images can suffer a little when you import them
• You’ll give people motion sickness if you zoom in and out and around too much
• You need to have a creative flair gene in order to make it look any good
• No ’save to’ feature. That means when I work on my desktop (my nice powerful dual quad core Mac Pro running Vista) to do all my editing I then have to sync the presentation online, and then download it onto my laptop in order to take it with me and tweak in the few hours leading up to a presentation. Once the file gets pretty big this process can take some time to do.
• It only works with some presenters. I had a Targus presenter with laser pointer and an SD card slot for recording, but it didn’t work. Luckily, it did work with the Logitech presenter I gave to my friend Mia so all was not lost!

What I’d like to see — My Top 5

• More video support — especially divx and wma
• Finer motion control — so I can control the rate of acceleration and zooming
• Export objects — so I can have greater reuse of the Prezi
• Grouping of multiple objects
• Create/edit template

Is Prezi for you?

Now that I’ve done two presentations in Prezi I think it’s more a design tool and not really a replacement for PowerPoint. For people who have difficulty with PowerPoint and use slabs of text this is not the tool for you. For those of you with lots of design flair and know how to pace a presentation with both graphics and text then this tool could be for you.

M

Apple Tablet PC — not a business machine

I was dissapointed to read that the rumoured Apple Tablet is likely to be little more than a media player and gaming device, possibly with some kind of potential Apple TV tie-in.

The current gossip on the Apple Tablet:

• Marketed somewhere in the $699-$799 USD range
• 10″ screen
• Wireless connectivity similar to the iPod Touch, with the ability to download media through iTunes
• Touch screen similar to the iPod Touch and iPhone — a graphics pen for writing, though, would suit me more
• Available in September — just in time for Christmas — although some speculate arrival as late as October
• Possibly made by Asus
• It may not have a keyboard, acting more like a slate, as per the iPod Touch and iPhone

Media PC? Gaming device? It’s a pity that this tablet may just not be the tablet I thought it was going to be.

M

Apple Tablet rumours abound … again

It wasn’t too long ago that I wrote about the Apple Tablet rumous. Over the last 2 years it seems that Apple has simply denied that it was ever going to make one because it just wasn’t a viable product given the tablet market is very small. It seems, though, that the Financial Times is now suggesting we’ll get one — and it’s coming for Christmas.

“The talks come as Apple is separately racing to offer a portable, full-featured, tablet-sized computer in time for the Christmas shopping season, in what the entertainment industry hopes will be a new revolution. The device could be launched alongside the new content deals, including those aimed at stimulating sales of CD-length music, according to people briefed on the project.”

I do love my Toshiba tablet. And I find the 12″ screen about the right size — not too big (to be portable) and not too small so that you can’t do Photoshop or Axure prototyping work. It might only have an ultra low power Dual Core processor, but it seems to do the job pretty well with Vista. But I did want something sexy and Apple always delivers those goods. The build quality, the design, the aesthetics are all reasons why I bought my Mac Pro Cheese Grater. Now I’m starting to drool over what might be just around the door.

Screen size: “may be up to 10 inches diagonally”, touch sensitive (of course)

Wireless connectivity: Same as the iPod Touch, with the ability to download media through iTunes.Kindle Rival? May provide the ability to read books, creating a rival to Amazon’s Kindle.

Launch date: By Christmas, possibly as early as September.

Will I give up my Toshiba for the Apple? I think we’ll just wait and see whether Apple deliver the goods or not … and then, of course, I’ll just install Windows on it like I did my Mac Pro

M