Weekend Coffee Break
January 5th, 2008 (10:46am) Mike Gunderloy 5 Comments
Google Upgrades Presentations - While the rest of us were busy taking a holiday, it looks like the Google engineers were working on the presentations portion of Google Documents. Among the coolest new features are presentation embedding (which gives you an iframe with your presentation that you can stick on pretty much any web page) and slide-specific import. They’ve also added drag-and-drop slide rearrangement, easy image insertion, and backgrounds on a per-slide basis.
It’s still a long ways from being a “PowerPoint killer,” but for an awful lot of presentations, who cares? If you don’t need fancy transitions or embedded objects, zero-install and available-anywhere are features in themselves.
RSS to SMS - Don’t want to wait an extra moment to get the latest WWD post (or anything else that’s available by RSS, for that matter)? Hop over to Pingie and sign up to have the feed directed right to your phone. Just beware of your carrier’s charges for text messages.
The Data Portability Fuss - If the recent flap over Facebook data has you thinking about the issues of keeping your own personal data, you might want to stop by DataPortability.org, where they’re thinking about systems for keeping identity and data your property rather than that of the sites you use. So far they seem much more oriented to technical fixes than the social issues, but I suspect more activism is in their future as well.
5 Comments Post your own comment
listen_to_webworker_daily says: January 5th, 2008 2:55pm
I was just wondering why we are blogging about a teeny tiny feature ? slideshow for a presentation has been there in MS office since day one?
listen_to_blogs
Mike Gunderloy says: January 5th, 2008 3:05pm
It’s not the slideshow, but the simple embedding of the slideshow in a web page of your choice - if that’s in PowerPoint, I’ve missed it.
NikLP says: January 6th, 2008 4:50am
Why no link to DP.O?
Mike Gunderloy says: January 6th, 2008 5:33am
NikLP: The link is there, right in the title of the paragraph. Sorry if you found it confusing.
Geetesh Bajaj says: January 6th, 2008 11:08pm
I like the embedding part, but since they used the scripting route rather than Flash output, I’m wondering how they will cope with animations and transitions — of course, as of now, Google Presentations has no animations and transitions. But later?