Life is grand

Awhile back I did a talk on Ajax and wanted to share the presentation with the world. It was pretty low-tech, a link to a downloadable PowerPoint file. You had to have PowerPoint or its viewer and you couldn’t preview the slides.

I also recently attended RailsConf Europe 2006 and collected some of the presentations together. Once again low-tech links to slide files. No previews and with the wide audience I’ll bet many didn’t have PowerPoint.

Not long ago we had the same problem with sharing video. Different formats, no easy way to preview, downloading links and files and what not. Then YouTube came along and suddenly all you needed was Flash and you could upload and view thousands of videos. No codec hassles, what a pleasure.

SlideShare does that but for presentation files. Upload a PowerPoint file and anyone with Flash can view it. That rocks.

TechCrunch gave a good overview and listed a few problems. I’d like to add that SlideShare needs to support more presentation formats (and telling Keynote users to save as PPT is probably not the best idea though it is practical for now.) And not just the standard presentation formats but PDF and HTML too. Loads of the RubyConf speakers distributed their slides as PDF. SlideShare should support that.

Full screen viewing would be good too. I am not sure how they do the conversion but Flash supports vector fine so scaling to any resolution isn’t a problem. You can go full-screen as the comment below suggests and it works well. Also I just noticed two clever features; for each slide the public can comment. So it isn’t just a general comment per presentation. The other feature is that the text of each slide is extracted and shown below the presentation. Very clever and I imagine will make search engines happy.

It is in private beta at the moment but I got an invite pretty easily. All in all though SlideShare is a fantastic idea and works pretty well. Give it a go.

Slash7 has posted the slides from their brilliant Javascript Boot Camp Tutorial talk at OSCON. 108 pages of pure JavaScript love. One thing I just learnt, on page 36, is that you can pass a function as an arguement into another function. That function can then call the arguement function. Sounds weird but that is pretty amazing if you ask me.