Adobe launches online presentations app (web based PowerPoint)
When Adobe launched its online office suite at Acrobat.com last year the site was a bit on the anemic side. Sure, it featured the slick Flash-based Buzzword word processor. But it lacked a good spreadsheet or presentations application. There's still no spreadsheet app in sight, but today Adobe added an attractive tool for viewing and editing presentations to Acrobat Labs.
Like Buzzword, Acrobat Presentations is built on Flash. It features the smooth and attractive animations you'd expect from a Flash-based application. But it's also fairly intuitive to use. At the top of the screen are a series of icons which expand into toolbars to give you access to the features you need at any given moment. The left side of the screen shows thumbnails for each slide, while the slide itself hangs out in the center for your viewing, creating, or editing pleasure. Or you can hit the Play Slideshow button in the bottom right corner if you just want to sit back and enjoy the show.
Because the application is built on Flash, the right-click button on your mouse is useless which MS Office addicts might find frustrating at first. But Acrobat Presentations does give you most of the tools you'd expect from a presentation application, plus online collaboration tools. You can share your presentations with other users and let them edit your files.
[via VentureBeat]
Like Buzzword, Acrobat Presentations is built on Flash. It features the smooth and attractive animations you'd expect from a Flash-based application. But it's also fairly intuitive to use. At the top of the screen are a series of icons which expand into toolbars to give you access to the features you need at any given moment. The left side of the screen shows thumbnails for each slide, while the slide itself hangs out in the center for your viewing, creating, or editing pleasure. Or you can hit the Play Slideshow button in the bottom right corner if you just want to sit back and enjoy the show.
Because the application is built on Flash, the right-click button on your mouse is useless which MS Office addicts might find frustrating at first. But Acrobat Presentations does give you most of the tools you'd expect from a presentation application, plus online collaboration tools. You can share your presentations with other users and let them edit your files.
[via VentureBeat]













Comments
3
Subscribe to commentsbrokkMay 27th 2009 2:05PM
Just took part in one yesterday.
It's absolutely stunning.
QuikboyMay 28th 2009 7:42AM
I wonder how much longer it will take for Microsoft to put Office-like functionality into a web browser.
AurrinMay 28th 2009 1:26PM
I distinctly dislike where this is headed. Trying to implement a full office suite in flash? I mean, why don't you just do a parallel processing super-computer in JAVA on a hosted VM while you're at it? Really, I think we're starting to push browsers too far into what will eventually become a crawling horror. I'd like to see this go the other way, and start pulling some of the web functionality we associate with browsers into other applications. For instance, instead of asking why you can't have Office in Firefox, I think the better question is why the two can't share data in more than a download-and-spin-off-a-process fashion? Let the browsers stick to doing what they do best instead of trying to make them all-in-one hosting environments. They're coming dangerously close to being web-oriented operating systems unto themselves, at which point you've done something horribly wrong in your design.