My original splurt on powerpoint/keynote inspired by Rich Gold's idea that powerpoint is a toy for thought drew a load of fascinating comments, ideas and links, so I thought I'd like to get some of them out into the main body of the blog and think about them some more. Thanks to everyone for chucking stuff in. I get the sense that there's a real appetite out there for a presentation tool that stimulates thought as well as marshals it and that allows presenting to become variously less formal, more theatrical, more improvised and more conversational.
I don't think we can do it all in one post so I'm going to tackle different aspects in separate posts. Today: what keynote calls Light Table and what PowerPoint calls Slide Sorter. ie this:
Now that's the view where I do quite a lot of thinking about structure. And I know I'm not alone in that. Dave says that's how he put the structure together for this, probably the best 20 minutes of PowerPoint you will ever see. Unfortunately the snap-to-grid linearity of the tool doesn't allow the kind of sorting, randomising and testing that you'd really like to do at this point. Kevin talks about his process of sorting images on the floor and that reminded me of a couple of possibilities I'd love to see in Light Table / Slide Sorter, the first of which, I guess, is about more closely mimicking the actual physics of sorting slides.
So instead of being forced to sort in a fixed
grid.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could pile, group and stack slides, and maybe leave a couple on their own in the corner, because you know you want to include them but you're not quite sure where. Sort of like BumpTop. Well, exactly like BumpTop. That can't be that hard can it? You wouldn't have to have really complex physics, just the ability to break out of the grid a little. But it'd be great.
The other thought is a little sillier but I still think it'd be useful. And it combines two of my favourite interface/structural ideas - fruit machines and Runaround. I've always thought that more things in life could do with Hold and Nudge buttons. There are so many situations where you'd like to Hold one or two elements of a situation and stir up the rest.
Like that. So it might be useful to have a couple of slides you could Hold, you know they have to stay there as anchors in the story. So you could click a Hold button for them. But then you'd like to stir the rest up to try and create some interesting new variations and juxtapositions, to shake up your thinking. I guess if you were being consistent with the metaphor this is where you'd click a Nudge button, but that's not quite what I'm after. So I preferred the idea of a big Run Around button where everything just re-sorts itself. (And which should include a pleasingly silly noise.)
I'd like that, even if no-one else would.
And then, while I was putting this together, and looking through my flickr stuff for images of fruit machines I realised who could do this really well - flickr.
Flickr could become a great presentation tool. I bet people already store lots of presentation stuff in there. (Like this one I did for w+k). You could turn the Organize view into a slide sorter and add a presenter thing like Google's (but better). Or just do it in a browser. And I bet you could create interesting webs of slides using tags. Or something. Anyway, I'd love to see how the flickr people would do a presentation tool. That'd be brilliant. Anyway.
Next time we'll think about some of the other comments.
