Animated Presentations Using SVG 49
Inspired by work on work on non-traditional presentations in KDE's Karbon (part of Calligra), Aditya Bhatt set out to create a purely client-side tool for creating animated presentations in the browser. Based upon svg-edit and using Sozi, the initial results are pretty cool. His weblog post documents the process — the choice of SVG versus html5's canvas, Javascript instead of SMIL, etc. highlighting the challenges faced even today with different browsers offering wildly different levels of support for each web technology. The sourcecode for Awwation can be had over at Github.
Quite variable results (Score:2, Interesting)
...depending on your browser, OS and graphics.
On my 8 year old thinkpad, the animations are pretty jerky on both chrome and firefox, but firefox's font is wrong. On a recent dell, the animations are nice and smooth, but the writing is unreadable on chrome, and some words are missing on firefox.
I really like the idea of this, and if you ignore the flashy presentations above, you could see how it might be useful to present an overview of something complex, but requiring discussion of certain parts of it in detail. However, I also agree that 'flashiness' needs to be avoided in presentations (NB flashiness is the better of the two evils when compared with speakers using their slides as their own notes).
The best presentations I've seen have come as a well thought-through narrative from the speaker, with graphics there only to illustrate their points.