On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 4:48 PM, Victor Shamanovsky <[address removed]> wrote:

Bruce, since we are honest here, I must remark that sample s5 presentations that I have seen so far were not pleasant to look at.

*chuckle*, why am I not surprised?  Victor, I would have been very shocked if you had said anything else, such as a positive comment about a non-Microsoft product or technology.

Aesthetics are in the eye of beholder.  Personally, I looked at two presentations, the introduction presentation and the notebook-themed Google presentation, and thought that they were more pleasant that the average Powerpoint presentation I see (or for that matter, produce, though I generally concentrate more on content and less on presentation).

 

Sure, with pleanty of development and CSS work it can happen. But we are back to the hiring a developer to do a presentation :)

Well, if S5 gets mindshare, then there will end up being lots of development of very attractive S5 themes and stylesheets.

Now, if you have PowerPoint 2007 presentation, try the following - change file extension from .pptx to .zip and look inside.

I'll save you the work: you are going to see XML. 

OK, that's a start.  But XML is only a syntax, not a standard for what can be done and how every component is guaranteed to be handled.  Given Microsoft's history of openness (along with their documented history of adding in ad-hoc code to torpedo competitors' efforts), until there's a complete specification covering *every* allowable and available tag, along with a non-ambiguous functional specification for how those tags have to be handled, and preferably including an open and independent test suite, then I will be somewhat skeptical that this XML that you've pointed me at is the open standard I was referring to.  And I tend to doubt that OOXML is it either, though I haven't read the spec of the objections to make an objective evaluation of it myself.

Let' kick this up a notch: this works on other Office 2007 file formats - Word, Excel.

Nice huh?

Nice?  Not yet.  Better (than what Microsoft has done in the past), yes.

Bruce
 

On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 4:31 PM, Bruce Israel <[address removed]> wrote:

Let's be honest here.  Powerpoint is easy to use by non-developers (it's target audience), and generates reasonably nice presentations.  While s5 generates very nice looking presentations with additional capabilities (and I also like the idea of the presentations being in an open text-based standard that I can edit myself if my tools turn out to not generate exactly what I'd like to see), until it's integrated with a front-end development tool that views things in that domain space (that being "presentations"), it's not going to be as easy to use.

How many CFOs are going to want to (or be able to) develop a presentation by working with a tool like Frontpage, a tool that is about developing web pages, not presentations (though they can obviously be overlayed) and then take that and move it into the S5 environment for checking and display.  It's just not a workable model for presentation development.

When there's an integrated development environment that works with it nicely, then at that point it can be considered to be a Powerpoint replacement (or superseder).

Bruce

On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 1:17 PM, Asif Youssuff <[address removed]> wrote:

Victor Shamanovsky wrote:
> In a context of this specific case for a basic task of creating a
> presentation:
>
> - in powerpoint it takes 3 clicks to add audio (so the rest of your
> time can be spend on polishing visuals and effects)
> - in s5 it is a developer writing code, testing, debugging, etc.

I'm surprised that you've never heard of GUI web development apps. I
mean, I'm sure you've heard of Frontpage, haven't you?

-Asif

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