Georg Wrede wrote:
> That hit me too. I've been using PP or OO "just because", never really thinking. But there are some advantages to using "a straight, long document".
> 
> It's a /lot/ faster to create the presentation. You don't have to split stuff into screenfulls (or fight with the presentation software!) And once on stage, scrolling back is way easier and faster! And you can sroll to exactly where you want, instead of to the nearest screenful.
> 
> Heh, now I can say "if it's good enough for Walter Bright on a big butt guru forum, I can use it, too!"

Everyone I talked to who was there didn't like it. I've switched to OO Impress!

Walter Bright wrote:
> Georg Wrede wrote:
>> That hit me too. I've been using PP or OO "just because", never really thinking. But there are some advantages to using "a straight, long document".
>>
>> It's a /lot/ faster to create the presentation. You don't have to split stuff into screenfulls (or fight with the presentation software!) And once on stage, scrolling back is way easier and faster! And you can sroll to exactly where you want, instead of to the nearest screenful.
>>
>> Heh, now I can say "if it's good enough for Walter Bright on a big butt guru forum, I can use it, too!"
> 
> Everyone I talked to who was there didn't like it. I've switched to OO Impress!

There's always S5: it lets you make slideshows in HTML.

http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/

  -- Daniel

Daniel Keep wrote:
> There's always S5: it lets you make slideshows in HTML.
> 
> http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/

After playing with OO Impress for a while, I've found it to be quicker and easier to produce a slideshow with it than with html. For another thing, the fonts render obviously better than in firefox. I have no idea why.

Walter Bright wrote:
> Georg Wrede wrote:
>> That hit me too. I've been using PP or OO "just because", never really thinking. But there are some advantages to using "a straight, long document".
>>
>> It's a /lot/ faster to create the presentation. You don't have to split stuff into screenfulls (or fight with the presentation software!) And once on stage, scrolling back is way easier and faster! And you can sroll to exactly where you want, instead of to the nearest screenful.
>>
>> Heh, now I can say "if it's good enough for Walter Bright on a big butt guru forum, I can use it, too!"
> 
> Everyone I talked to who was there didn't like it. 

I think there's the *subconscious* notion of "not respecting the audience by bothering to do a Proper Presentation". And they let it seep through, instead of pausing to think about the upsides. (The more we think we're Thinking Individuals, the less we're wary of such seep-through. I see it all the time with professionals.)

The "presentation software format" is more restrictive than we usually think. Everything has to be crunched to ridiculous screenfuls, mostly containing a couple of bullet items. And if you want the audience to follow the presentation "where you are" you have to do all kinds of one-at-a-time appearing bullets. It's really pathetic. (And I, at least, end up spending inordinate time figuring should they fly in from the left or rignt, or should they "emerge", or whatever.) Instead of simply scrolling them into view when needed.

Yes, PP &co make for an audience experience, but as the Columbia disaster taught NASA, it's not really the way to go.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Tufte)

PP is for M$ style sales pitches, not for disseminating serious content. IMNSHO, of course. (And the less there's bread and butter, the more you can decorate, having everybody exit, aahing and oohing all the way home.)

And how do you present conveniently a code snippet that exceeds a screenful? Like, if it's two screens long, do you split it into three screens, first half, middle part (showing latter half of first screen and first half of last screen), and second half? Instead of conveniently being able to scroll it as the discussion goes.

To prove my point, what if a lecturer 20 years ago had began by drawing a square on the chalkboard, and then only writing bullet items there, always erasing them before writing more. And leaving the rest of the chalkboard unused. (The rest of the chalkboard here represents scrolling back and forth the long document.)

If PP was the superior format, then all web pages would be just a few bullets and a <goto next page> button at the bottom.

> I've switched to OO Impress!

-- Damn, now I can't use Walter as an excuse to ditch PP. :-)

flGeorg Wrede wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> Everyone I talked to who was there didn't like it. 
> 
> I think there's the *subconscious* notion of "not respecting the audience by bothering to do a Proper Presentation". And they let it seep through, instead of pausing to think about the upsides. (The more we think we're Thinking Individuals, the less we're wary of such seep-through. I see it all the time with professionals.)
> 
> The "presentation software format" is more restrictive than we usually think. Everything has to be crunched to ridiculous screenfuls, mostly containing a couple of bullet items. And if you want the audience to follow the presentation "where you are" you have to do all kinds of one-at-a-time appearing bullets. It's really pathetic. (And I, at least, end up spending inordinate time figuring should they fly in from the left or rignt, or should they "emerge", or whatever.) Instead of simply scrolling them into view when needed.
> 
> Yes, PP &co make for an audience experience, but as the Columbia disaster taught NASA, it's not really the way to go.
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Tufte)
> 
> PP is for M$ style sales pitches, not for disseminating serious content. IMNSHO, of course. (And the less there's bread and butter, the more you can decorate, having everybody exit, aahing and oohing all the way home.)
> 
> And how do you present conveniently a code snippet that exceeds a screenful? Like, if it's two screens long, do you split it into three screens, first half, middle part (showing latter half of first screen and first half of last screen), and second half? Instead of conveniently being able to scroll it as the discussion goes.
> 
> To prove my point, what if a lecturer 20 years ago had began by drawing a square on the chalkboard, and then only writing bullet items there, always erasing them before writing more. And leaving the rest of the chalkboard unused. (The rest of the chalkboard here represents scrolling back and forth the long document.)
> 
> If PP was the superior format, then all web pages would be just a few bullets and a <goto next page> button at the bottom.

I don't agree. I think there is much more at work here. Slides are limited in size and text content simply because there is so much information a person can absorb simultaneously by hearing and seeing. So the slide with text is simply an anchor, a high-level memento to rest one's eyes on, while the speaker gives some detail pertaining to the high-level points that the slide makes.

The slide is not meant to convey complex information with completeness. There is, for example, no hope in putting complex proofs or formulae on the slide. Instead, you give the conclusion and e.g. some top-level formula and point to the paper or whatever for people interested in details. The typical conference talk is 15-20 minutes regardless of the fields' complexity. The only hope an author can make is not to explain everything done, but instead to raise interest in reading the actual paper.

If a code snippet is larger than a screenful, then there is a problem with the presentation. Most people will tune out if they have to sit down and understand code while at the same time somebody is talking their ear off. Good code slides focus on one small but unusual/interesting/relevant code portion at a time, have the author explain what's going on, and then move to another portion of the code.

I've been in Walter's HTML-based talks. Yes, my perception was indeed that the talk was not properly prepared, although I knew it was. I have no idea why that is, though I can speculate that the scrolling style leads to looser presentations as the format does not force one to present ideas crisply, one at a time.

Anyway (and unrelated), IMHO a much worse mistake a speaker might do is to go over allocated time. I'm sure few mean it that way, but the perceived message is that they assume what they have to say is important and interesting enough to trump your and whatever events' schedule. My slides are mediocre, but I make a point at landing to a tee when it comes about time.

The second largest mistake (since you mention worrying about bulletpoints flying, oh boy) is to use effects without reason. It's distracting, devoid of any message, and so often completely distasteful, it's a safe bet to avoid them altogether. There is precisely one place where I saw good (actually great) presentation animation: in SIGGRAPH presentations. And of course they never use text effects a la Powerpoint!


Andrei

I generally agree with Andrei (and he knows what he's doing, his talks are both entertaining and informative, several cuts above the usual ones I have to sit through).

I find after giving a presentation using a non-traditional format, that the non-traditional format becomes the topic of conversation, not the ideas in the presentation. It's distracting.


Some more issues:

o Since Impress is wysiwyg, I find it a lot easier to adjust things to fit on the screen. I had constant problems with the html one moving from one screen size to another.

o Impress has a one-button render as PDF, which is pretty handy.

o If you want to make handouts, print shops know how to deal with pdf. It just works, and you get good results.

o pdf renders a lot better than html. Why that should be, I don't know, but it is obviously better.

o being able to do boxes and arrows and such in Impress is much better than trying to do it in MS Paint and importing a gif.

o Of course I miss the D source code highlighting that Ddoc does.

o Impress doesn't seem to be able to do tables. Bummer.


I recently saw some ppt presentations where the presenter felt compelled to try out every single special effect ppt has. It was distracting and rather annoying, and certainly took away from his presentation. It looked like something his kid put together.

It makes one appreciate all the more a good one, like the ones Andrei and Scott Meyers put on.

Andrei Alexandrescu:
> Slides are limited in size and text content simply because there is so much information a person can absorb simultaneously by hearing and seeing.

Of course mammal brains have limits, but such limits are always higher than the amount of information shown in normal slides.


> I've been in Walter's HTML-based talks. Yes, my perception was indeed that the talk was not properly prepared, although I knew it was. I have no idea why that is, though I can speculate that the scrolling style leads to looser presentations as the format does not force one to present ideas crisply, one at a time.

I haven't appreciated much the html-based presentation, but probably some compromise can be found between that and the standard information-starved slides.
One problem with Walter's HTML-based talk was the long searching scroll up and down. You can create separated pages in Html too. (in my presentations I usually use pdf pages with a good amount of stuff. OpenOffice is able to output such PDF files too).

Bye,
bearophile

== Quote from Andrei Alexandrescu (SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org)'s article
> The slide is not meant to convey complex information with completeness. There is, for example, no hope in putting complex proofs or formulae on the slide.

Wow.  I really wish the rest of the Ph.D students in this world would learn this.

== Quote from Georg Wrede (georg.wrede@iki.fi)'s article
>
> The "presentation software format" is more restrictive than we usually think. Everything has to be crunched to ridiculous screenfuls, mostly containing a couple of bullet items. And if you want the audience to follow the presentation "where you are" you have to do all kinds of one-at-a-time appearing bullets. It's really pathetic. (And I, at least, end up spending inordinate time figuring should they fly in from the left or rignt, or should they "emerge", or whatever.) Instead of simply scrolling them into view when needed.
...
> PP is for M$ style sales pitches, not for disseminating serious content. IMNSHO, of course. (And the less there's bread and butter, the more you can decorate, having everybody exit, aahing and oohing all the way home.) And how do you present conveniently a code snippet that exceeds a screenful?

When I went back to finish my degree I was forced to take a Public Speaking course, and the course basically had one simple message:

The likelihood that an audience will either get lost or bored is an exponential function of the complexity of the presentation.  As much as I despise the PP- based presentation format, it does force the speaker to simplify things as much as possible.

== Quote from Andrei Alexandrescu (SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org)'s article
>
> I don't agree. I think there is much more at work here. Slides are limited in size and text content simply because there is so much information a person can absorb simultaneously by hearing and seeing. So the slide with text is simply an anchor, a high-level memento to rest one's eyes on, while the speaker gives some detail pertaining to the high-level points that the slide makes.

For lectures I basically have a choice between two options:

1. Take notes and not remember a darn thing that was said. 2. Not take any notes and remember the lecture.

I've seen a few raised eyebrows at times, but this is why I never write anything down at a meeting or lecture I'm attending--it draws my focus away from the material being presented.

What I really like is when a lecturer provides pre-written notes for their presentation.  This way I can get everything out of the lecture itself, and still have material to review later if I want to be reminded of some detail. Other than a professor or two I've seen precious few people actually do this however.