Prezi Makes A Zooming Map Of Your Presentations
Prezi is a Flash-based online presentation maker that doesn’t believe all slides are the same. Prezi allows creators to zoom in, slide over, play videos, animate, and do other eye-catching stuff with your information.
It’s hard to capture exactly what a difference custom zooming and framing have on a presentation until you see it yourself. Prezi, unfortunately, doesn’t offer embedding of its hosted presentations (at least with its free licence), but anyone can check out Prezi’s showcased works to see what the deal is about. Editing itself is done with a neat wheel/cog corner tool and a drag-and-drop grid background. The site offers a lot of tutorial videos and demonstrations, like this nice overview of editing and presentation:
Even a free account gets an offline player to use, which is a big plus, and upgrading to “Enjoy” or “Pro” accounts for €39 or €119 grants access to “Private Prezi,” upgrades your Prezi.com storage space, and removes Prezi’s logo from your presentations. It’s similar to Microsoft’s very protoype-level pptPlex, but with a refined interface and pretty impressive looks. Free to use, requires a sign-up and email activation. Prezi [via TechCrunch]
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
"Prezi, unfortunately, doesn't offer embedding of its hosted presentations (at least with its free license)"
However, on the Prezi site it says "All licenses include (...) Embed Prezis into blogs and websites"
Has anyone tested this, and knows which one is right?
Steven_S
@Steven_S: Try this older version. It worked great for me (I tried several workarounds to try to make the current version work, but I was unsuccesful)
[msofficelb.vo.llnwd.net]
ninjaviking
@gilamon: I checked it, but it didn't work for me. Perhaps becauce I don't have net3 installed?
Steven_S
i like it..
am now testing "impressive" (link) and i totally will give it a try to this one..
The subscription model is a deal-breaker for me. Seems like this kind of project would show up on Google or SourceForge eventually.
Bill Sodeman
I really like the way this works and how it looks, I just don't like the price for the offline version. The price is way to high to compete with Powerpoint, which most have already so it is harder to justify the expense for Prezi.
bbobjoe
@AlexJAnder: EDIT: would love to see something like pptPlex on the Mac.
I really like seeing the entire presentation on one "page." That would make editing and moving ideas from one grouping/slide to another a LOT easier.
This would be ideal for online comics. Seems perfect for panning and zooming for each cell.
nervekeg
@Steven_S: agreed. They would argue they're giving you hosting too I suppose.
I'd but it for £50. £100 if I could use it officewide. But a yearly licence is... meh.. Just charge for V2, or V3.
Check out Powerpointplex from Microsoft's office labs. It gives you a lot of the same capabilities for free if you can live with beta software.
I use it all the time.
[www.officelabs.com]
gilamon
Steven S and others: If you are interested in presenting mindmaps as presentations you can try the paid version of XMIND.
Durbrow
I signed up because it seems a good way for me to convert my mindmaps into presentations - especially those that I can't really explain well with normal ppt slides. Plus, it seems interesting for really long talks (sessions of a few hours), to maintain overview. I can even re-use older presentations by inserting screenshots of powerpoint slides into it.
You only get a desktop version with the most expensive package though, which I find a bit steeply priced. I might want to buy the software for 99 USD (after I have tested it quite a bit), but not 99 USD per year...
So, for me: too expensive as long as I don't use this for al my presentations (which I probably won't).
Steven_S
Looks pretty, but I'm not making a single presentation on a server that doesn't belong to me. There seems to be a "Pro" client that runs on your own computer though..
This is certainly a nice venture outside the box from the usual slide-show presentations. However, I wonder if it lacks a certain... seriousness/professionalism?
NicolesBoots
Very pretty, but I'm not sure it's a huge step forward. Zooming doesn't solve the fact that many people are poorly trained in how to present information effectively. This is just another tool for style over substance. Would be fun for a brilliant TED presentation, though...
Harlan Harris
I tried this earlier this morning because I liked the fresh approach to presentations. My overall take is that while it's cool when played, setup was difficult though I have to admit I only spent 5 minutes trying it out. I plan on going back to play some more but it seems like a solution in search of a problem and because the interface is so drastically different than a traditional presentation application, it requires a paradigm shift in how design things. I'm sure those of us on the bleeding edge will find this cool because of the way it displays the presentations but standard PowerPoint users will likely get lost in the interface and won't be able to make the jump to think less linearly and more big picture.
ski2dude
I would love for this to become the new standard for presentations.
I swear if I end up sitting through another PPT slideshow where every slide is a different color and written in Comic Sans with random pixelated raster graphics, I'm going to puke rainbows.
darknecross
Prezi is an awesome concept but after spending a few days testing it out, it is buggy as hell. Text appears and disappears, things move around randomly. Once they work out all of the flaws I will give it another chance.
BlendaLaterensis