Creating presentations isn’t the hard part of a presentation. What’s hard is the set-up before the presentation. You plug in your flash drive (like the good old days), or you sign on to your cloud storage and find your slides (like the good less older days), or you log in to your email and download the presentation (like the good old-ish days). Assuming that no part of your file has been corrupted or you didn’t forget to save or you didn’t accidentally save an older version or the wrong version and that there are no version conflicts, you can now present! Then there’s those among us, myself included, who like to have a “speaker/presenter view” on the laptop while the slides display on the projector. This part usually requires even more setup. Admittedly, the emergence of cloud storage has taken away some of the pain associated with presenting, but I’ve been tortured enough times to look for a better presentation solution.
Introducing Slid.es
About a month ago, I was looking for better presentation software to do my next PowerPoint. I had seen some of the folks at Sudo Soldiers use a really cool web app for presentations. I didn’t know what it was, but their presentations looked fantastic! Turns out, they were using reveal.js, an HTML/JS based presentation framework. Slid.es is based on this and other frameworks, while offering a neat visual editor to design your slides. You can edit and present directly from your browser, without any additional software, and your slides are publicly viewable.
Why Slid.es?
Among all its great features, the single aspect about Slid.es that had me sold was its ease and flexibility of presenting. How many other programs or applications allow you to use your smartphone or tablet as a remote? Or watch a live presentation from your personal desktop, laptop, smartphone, or tablet?
Presenting with your mobile device
One of the main rules of presentation etiquette is that you should never stay in one place for the whole presentation. That’s why many professors and public speakers use a remote when presenting with slides, to free them from the anchor of the lectern. With Slid.es, you can use your smartphone, or anybody’s smartphone for that matter, as the remote. On your mobile device, simply go to your Speaker view at slides.com/username/slides-name/speaker, and log in. On the computer that’s hooked to the projector, point the browser to slides.com/username/slides-name/live. No fidgeting around with cables, Bluetooth, wireless connections, or repeatedly banging your head against the wall. Just swipe or tap, and watch the slides change automagically.
Don’t have a smartphone? Navigate to the same speaker URL on your desktop/laptop and enjoy Slid.es Speaker View: Desktop Edition.
Anybody can watch your presentation
With a regular presentation file, only the computer with the file can view or display the presentation. With cloud storage, you can make your presentation public, but this usually takes some setup. Slid.es makes broadcasting your presentation painless. So long as your presentation is publicly viewable (this is the default), just tell your audience to go to slides.com/username/slides-name/live. That’s it. When you change slides, your audience sees it. They also see any transitions that you put in and between slides, allowing a seamless viewing experience. And because your live presentation is entirely online, anyone in the world, not just people in your room, can watch your slides, in real time.
Works on all devices
You can’t really call a web application “modern” if it doesn’t work across desktop, mobile, and tablet browsers. Fortunately, Slid.es adapts wonderfully to mobile and small screen devices. It’s simple HTML and responsive CSS means that one person can watch your presentation with any Internet-enabled device, and your presentation will fit snugly on the screen.
Get it
There are so many wonderful features of Slid.es, that I’ll leave it to their website to tell you about it. Team accounts, pro accounts, HTML editor, transitions, animations, it’s all there.
Link: slides.com or slid.es.
Price: Free! Paid accounts available as well.
