Xara as the new PowerPoint

[Xhris]

I was watching a seminar presentation today, and was realising how patchy the diagrams looked in PowerPoint. And I remembered how long I spent trying to make a presentation that I gave recently, really beautifully organic. Then the thought occurred to me: wouldn’t it be great if Xara could be used to give presentations? And then I started to think some more (instead of listening to what was being said).

Xara can do DTP layout, multi pages, flash animation, and is object orientated. Most of the ingredients for a PowerPoint-like direction are already in place. And what better way to advertise Xara than to use it to show people presentations?

I suspect a new document type might be required, analogous to an animation document type, and the frame gallery could be used to see each slide.

Done well, all of Xara’s advanced graphical functionality could be used directly within the program, without the need to export flash files/animated gifs for simple effects, e.g. fading text in, and fading from one slide to another. It could even be possible to have an internally referenced advanced flash-like animation type (i.e. flash without the limitations e.g. using blending etc.) for complex animations; a pre-made xar file animation in which the advanced flash-like file is made can be referenced to load as an object on the page in the presentation. It seems like there's the potential for a supreme (graphically at least) presentation package using Xara, which would further help reach additional audiences.

[Anders 205]

Great thinking, Xhris! Let's do some experimentals!

Anders

[salaam]

The strength of Powerpoint is that it is basic tool for the ignorant masses. Xara design tools for the dedicated minority. I don't think such an invasion, by Xara, into another territory could work, unless you are suggesting that 'professionals' start producing slide shows for clients. If you are, and then I don't think you would find much of a market. Powerpoint like all MS software encourages the 'do it yourself' mentality.

[gnurf]

Simple presentations can easily be done with Xtreme in form of PDF files. This would at the moment exclude navigation buttons (works with javascript in acrobat if I remember correctly, so one would have to use standard acrobat reader navigation as PageDown - PageUp keys etc) and animations/video/sound.

[Nostaw]

Well there is a fantastic product out there, a competitor to PowerPoint - you can save self-running extreme small .exe files with butter-smooth, non-flickering, text antialiased scrolltexts, various page fade in effects - and even scripting events (if wanted, but not needed for linear presentations like powerpoint). They have a Tetris game example entirely done in their scripting engine.. Can't remember the link, will post it tomorrow...

[gwpriester]

You can add a web address to text or an object. And in the PDF Export you can include Hyperlinks.

So, could you not make the link address the file name and folder location? e.g. C:\my_presentation\page_2.pdf or something like this?

Gary

[davelash]

Apple's Keynote (Inconvenient Truth among other examples) really opened my eyes to how bad PP is. As an experiment, six months ago, I started building all my slides in Xara, exporting them as jpgs, and importing into PP for delivery only. I thought it would drive me crazy to go through those steps for every edit, but in fact, I happily exchange the inconvenience for a high-quality visual.

A surprising side benefit: it's much easier to find and organize individual Xara-built slides rather than opening numerous PP files to search for something I need.

I'm all for Xhris's suggestion and look forward to hearing ideas for Xara-based presentations.

best,
Dave

[Xhris]

The strength of Powerpoint is that it is basic tool for the ignorant masses. Xara design tools for the dedicated minority. I don't think such an invasion, by Xara, into another territory could work, unless you are suggesting that 'professionals' start producing slide shows for clients. If you are, and then I don't think you would find much of a market. Powerpoint like all MS software encourages the 'do it yourself' mentality.

>>Xara design tools for the dedicated minority.
This is absolutely not true. Not only have Xara stated on countless occasions that they also cater for the 'ignorant masses'/non-professional, but their entire update ethic in recent upgrades has shown how they are helping this to be true. And could this very argument not also be applied to Flash being included in Xara (which it was, as most of the necessary framework was already in place from the animated gif functionality), or even DTP functionality through multi-pages or enhanced text support? I should also add that PowerPoint is by no means a basic tool.

Yes you can do simple 'presentations' in Xara with PDF and Flash etc, but that's not what I was meaning. I was thinking of being able to produce graphically splendid and organic presentations that would blow anything you could do with PowerPoint (without great effort) out of the water.

[aridzone]

As long as microsoft charges anywhere from $150-680 to get
powerpoint I think there's a market

[Anders 205]

Well there is a fantastic product out there, a competitor to PowerPoint

Are you perhaps referring to Multimedia Builder by Mediachance? I have used it for ages. It's great for CDs, demos and presentations.

Anders