Tired of Slideshows: Try Sozi!

Sometimes I start think how the world would be without slideshows. Slideshow have been the tool to make presentations since long time. The fact that it have become a 'standard' for presentations is unthinkable to me. No one had develop any alternative?



Searching a little on the web I found a service, at start, looks very interesting. It was Prezi. Prezi is a zoom presentation editor. Its main features are:

• Pan y zooming.
• Media importation.
• Visible on iPad.
• Online and offline mode.
• Colaborative work.
• Work with storylines.

But I was not satisfied. Prezi uses Flash as main platform and it's a payed service. To me it's no scalable and I restarted my investigation. Between search and results, I found that somebody develop other alternative, that looks like Prezi, that at the end managed to fill my necessity of alternate the use of slides: Sozi.

• What is Sozi? Sozi is a small program that can create animated presentations.
• How does it work? Sozi does not work with slides. It is a poster in which its elements can be freely located. At the end, using zooms, pan and rotations, you can focus on these elements.
• How much it cost? It is a 'open source' tool, so there's no cost on it. It is licensed GPL 3.0.
• What is it extension? The presentations are SVG images that uses JavaScript code for its animations.

Now I will show an example (obtained from their website) that explains what is Sozi within a Sozi:

These are the features that I loved from this tool:

1. It is free and open source.
2. Easy to use.
3. Does not require third party applications. It is just an Inkscape plugin.
4. You can watch your presentations from almost any browser.
5. There's no online/offline mode.
6. Possibility of doing 'whatever you want', even importing audio/video.

So if you want to give it an opportunity, do not doubt on entering their website and follow the installation instructions. I consider it will be a great experience.

Referencias:

1. Inskcape web site.
2. Sozi web site.