Most online presentation apps try to imitate the look-and-feel of PowerPoint with varying degrees of success. Last week, I was pointed toward one online app trying to do things differently … by imitating the look of Apple's Keynote. Here's a look at what to expect in using 280 Slides.


a very Leopard-like interface

Because 280 Slides takes a lot of cues from Keynote, the interface is very subdued and unobtrusive. I personally prefer interfaces that try to stay out of my way while I'm working, so I can appreciate what they've done here.

Finally, while you can begin using 280 Slides with no registration, you do have to set up an account in order to save images and presentations. With that noted, let's get started.

Assembling a Presentation

Starting a new presentation opens up a theme chooser. There's nothing too exciting here, but Sagan is nice to look at. A couple of the other themes, like Sky, City, and Pink, look like they could be pretty visually distracting. In terms of slide layouts, there are currently only three: blank, title-and-content, and title slide. Fortunately, because objects and text can be easily arranged on the slide, these layouts don't limit possibilities.


the theme chooser

Adding text behaves just like Keynote. You can either double-click in a provided space or click the text icon in the toolbar to create a new text-box. The text creation tools are pretty sparse, but the selection of fonts is decent, including Hoefler Text, American Typewriter, Gill Sans, and Century Gothic among the selections. There's no support for Text Art, but that's probably a good thing.

Adding shapes, movies, and images is as simple as clicking the appropriate toolbar icon, and all three are managed from a single media pane. Shapes can be inserted through drag-and-drop, or you can double-click a shape to insert it. The Pictures tab searches Flickr and Google Images for results, and the Movies tab searches YouTube and Vimeo. You may also upload and store pictures in your own image library. It's worth noting that I ran into a couple of hang-ups in uploading images. I had no problems inserting a YouTube video.


the all-purpose media browser

It's also possible to enter an image URL to insert it into your slide, and this worked flawlessly. However, the inserted image was significantly larger than my slide, and I had to manually resize the image for it to fit – no automatic resizing like in Keynote. Additional omissions in image tools include the ability to crop pictures as well as add borders or shadows. It is very easy to alter any object's opacity with a slider in the Formatting Bar, and the opacity scales very smoothly.

Worth special mention is 280 Slides' color panel. While the first two tabs are the standard wheel and sliders, the third tab integrates with Adobe's Kuler service, allowing you to search for color schemes or browse popular ones. Any colors you find and like can be saved to a row of color swatches in the panel. You can save up to nine swatches.


selecting and saving colors

Finally, if you are looking for any build animations or slide transitions, look elsewhere. 280 Slides does not support animations at this time.

Sharing Your Creations

There are three buttons on the far right of the toolbar that allow you to share your slides: Present, Download, and Share.



Present fills the browser window with your slides, and you can click through them as you would a traditional PowerPoint presentation. The B key even works as expected. Unfortunately, the browser chrome is still visible, but if you use a windowless browser like Plainview, the display will be indistinguishable from any other presentation application.

The Download button will automatically place a .pptx file in your Downloads stack (or wherever you save downloaded files) that PowerPoint 2007/2008 can open and edit. I could not test this file since I do not have Office 2008 yet. With that in mind, since 280 Slides' output is so simple, it would be nice to be able to download the slides as a .pdf file or as a folder of images.

Finally, selecting Share allows you to email a PowerPoint file to someone, send your presentation to SlideShare (which is cool), or generate a direct link to your presentation for others to view from within their own browsers.

Other Random Observations

• The application does support scroll wheels and double-clicking in most interface elements with the exception of the theme and layout choosers. Double-clicking a theme or a layout will not apply it to your presentation/slide.
• Clicking and dragging to select multiple objects on a slide does not work. However, cmd-clicking and shift-clicking does.
• Double-clicking an object doesn't insert text like in Keynote.
• While inserted objects and images can be freely rotated, this is not true of text boxes.
• 280 Slides supports common keyboard commands such as cmd-s, cmd-c, cmd-v, and cmd-z.

Conclusions

Like Google Presentations and other online apps, 280 Slides is unlikely to supplant your usual tools. However, it is handy to have an "in-the-clouds" location to access your presentations at any time. Unfortunately, you can't upload a .ppt file to 280 Slides like you can to Google's service, and this probably limits the appeal. From a purely user-interface point of view, 280 Slides trumps anything I've used so far, but the features are too light to make a convert of me right now. I recommend you give the service a try for yourself, and submit feedback while you are at it. I'm sure more features and functionality will come with time.

Tags: online tools