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Comment by chrisfarms | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who finds the concept of "vertical slides" a bit, errr, wrong?

A presentation is a linear process. The first time a skipped through someone's slides who had this concept (without being presented to) I missed half of the content.

Is it for "things I might not have time for"? or What am I missing here?

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I recently used reveal for a conference talk, and structured it so that most of the slides are vertical. My talk had 5 horizontal slides: hello, topic 1, topic 2, topic 3, and then goodbye. I started off by saying "hi, i'm gonna talk about these three things:" and then scrolling right, then going back left and saying "Okay, topic 1" and then down.

Someone who didn't see the talk but looked at the slides found it VERY confusing.

Agree vertical is a bit suck. It's because it's much more complex to navigate - you're twice as likely to get lost as your brain works hard to remember it's position in a 2D space, much harder than a 1D "line" I think.

The need for drill-down is valid, but I some means of entering/exiting a new context would require less brain power. Like tabbed browsing. Or push/pop from a stack.

We're trying to crack these problems with some presenation tools we're prototyping. Fun fun...

I use them as "chapters". When there are question, I can navigate through chapters and the audience gets a repeat of the main points.

Use "space" for advancing.

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