280 Slides: PowerPoint made fast and easy, online | Hacker News Reader

280 Slides: PowerPoint made fast and easy, online

news.cnet.com

280 Slides is a brilliant technological feat and I would never be bold enough to attempt something like Objective J, but I have to say, I don't see the point of 280 Slides and Google Presentation. Perhaps it's because I'm a PowerPoint fan boy, but why would anyone use 280 Slides instead of PowerPoint or Keynote?

I can only see 3 reasons why you would:

- Cost, though most people pirate PPT/Keynote anyway and big companies can afford it.

- For people who don't use Mac or Windows or who switch to random computers a lot.

- Multi-user editing at the same time on the same presentation.

That seems to be a real minority of users though, and for just about every other reason, PowerPoint and Keynote trouce these web-based implementations. Even basic presentations are faster and easier to make and look nicer in a native app. For power users, it's no contest.

Is there something I'm not getting?

I think that the target is at the first group, though I agree: most people have some form of slide-editing at hand. Then again, I thought the same about Google Docs, but some people use it obsessively. I think that not having to worry about file transfers back and forth was a biggie for some people.

Multi-user editing can be really great sometimes. That's something that the desktop apps don't have or don't use effectively.

Behind-the-scenes version control is in Google Docs, so I'd expect it to be in their presentation app, too. That can be really handy, as well, and while you can do versioning decently in Powerpoint, I don't think may people use it.

It is made with Cappuccino (cappuccino.org/learn/) which I don't know how many of you have tried but it is really good. I was looking at alternatives to Silverlight and Adobe Air when I came across this. The best part is the user doesn't have download anything for this work on his browser.

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