"Whoa" is the first reaction I get when I show off yesterday's project. I'm astounded at the ease of manipulation in ZuiPrezi, the online, flash-based, zooming and swooping presentation tool. Watching a presentation conjures up images of those neat and just out-of-reach multi-touch interfaces.
Thanks to an reintroduction to FreeMind as a presentation tool by Scott Granneman a few years back, I started to appreciate the ability to move information that isn't relevent to the current point of a presentation out of sight to reduce distractions. I was still able to keep context to the larger topic by showing linked relationships.
Not all information is that simple though, and to force all points down in to singular links sometimes causes me to minimize the importance of other relationships between information. Sometimes it's enough to just show that a relationship exists. And, sometimes I just need to tell a story
ZuiPrezi delivers. The development team has built an intuitive design interface which can be controlled with simple keystrokes almost as easily as with the mouse. Here's a snip of the toolbox:
The basic process is this:
Drop information, images, video, and lines into the workspace
Draw "screens" to control the presentation zoom level and degrees of rotation
Draw a path from presentation start to finish.
Hit escape a few times to change to presentation mode. Click next and the presenter swooshes into and out of your screens to present varying levels of emphasis as perceived by relative object size. The vector nature of Flash makes this possible. Dots don't cut it, as evident by the tools handling of photos and images. Yuck.
This won't remove FreeMind from my toolset. Heck, I'll probably embed mindmaps into my Zuis, as long as the service stays available and reliable. I certainly don't trust it completely yet. I've come back into a saved presentation more than once to find my presentation looking different from how I left it.
Without further ado, here's the current state of the presentation I'm building:
Discussion about the tool is welcome; so is feedback and reaction about the current state of the presentation.
Another great day of music in Chicago. Christian, Jen--our kind and wonderful hostess, and I met Danielle and Brandon for brunch at Ann Sather. I had one of the specials: the lumberjack wrap-potato, cheese, eggs, bacon, and by my special request, green peppers for plenty of energy before another day competing with crowds for prime viewing/breakin-it-down real estate. Brandon and Danielle dropped Christian and I off downtown after a high-speed architectural tour of the business district. I caught the Tings again, MGMT for the first time (thanks Jaime!), an unforgettable Jamie Lidell, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, and Wilco from afar.
Midway through the day, I caught up with Morgan and Steve, who had stayed behind in STL for Nate's funeral and missed the first day of the festival. I have mixed feelings about leaving, but I feel pretty sure that Nate would approve. Anyway, more pics:
I seriously have no time to write. I need to be asleep. I've been up since five. We drove for 300 miles and then I stood in the sun and Chicago heat all afternoon.
I saw James Curd, Duffy, The Black Keys, Cat Power, Raconteurs, CSS, Radiohead all today. The alarm is set for 7:00am, six hours away.
