prezi – a new way of presentation

Yesterday I read very interesting article at root.cz (in czech) about prezi – an online presentation tool with a new concept. It is not separated to the slides, but you throw your ideas on a large desktop and then just zoom to specific text.

By enlarging the text, you can simply create topics and adding tiny text you can in other hand hide something until it is time to reveal it. A switching between ideas is made in very fashion way (almost like 3D animation over an area).

I created my first prezi in online tool and it seems to be useful. Unfortunately I faced very strange problem – I was unable to insert any picture into my presentation. Another great disadvantage is a lack of linux player (you can download either MacOS or Windows binaries for each presentation).

Well, you can still download Windows version, run it in wine and press Ctrl+Enter to switch app to fullscreen mode. Unfortunately menu still keep on a screen, but otherwise that is is ok.

They have desktop application, but it is for $160/year which seems to be way too much for me now. It brings me to an idea, how much difficult it would be to create an open source alternative in Java FX.

Anyway – once I will have an opportunity to create any „real“ presentation, I am willing to experiment and try it in prezi. It would be also nice to have some way how to remotely control such prezentation.