What happens when two former Apple employees - one from the iPhone team and one from the iTunes Store team - go off and start their own Y Combinator-backed startup? Apparently they come up with an online slideshow tool that looks highly reminiscent of Keynote.
280 North first presented 280 Slides (now available in public beta) earlier this Spring at YC’s biannual demo day. In their presentation, the three founders emphasized two reasons why 280 Slides would take off when other browser-based PowerPoint clones had failed.
First, 280 North has been designed to make users forget that they aren’t using a desktop application. And they do a good job sustaining that illusion, even though the application is based in JavaScript not Flash. 280 North has actually built out an entire JavaScript framework called Cappuccino that it plans to release as open source soon. Competitors who are also trying to recreate the desktop experience in the browser, such as Empressr and SlideRocket, have been built in Flash (and Flex in particular).
Secondly, 280 North touts how easy it is to download your slideshows in PowerPoint format. They figure that most people shy away from using online tools because ultimately they need to share their slideshows with friends. While Google Docs can also export to PowerPoint, 280 Slides puts this functionality front and center.
Overall, this is a simple application that has been designed to work and work right. You won’t find a lot of advanced features related to charts, styling, effects or collaboration, but fundamental stuff like keyboard strokes work just the way it should. Among the features 280 Slides does boast is the ability to publish on SlideShare, grab color combos from Adobe Kuler, add videos and photos from the likes of YouTube and Flickr, and embed on other sites.
It would be good to see auto-saves (my Safari crashed once, causing me to back up a bit - this is beta after all). More themes and controls over default settings (the default font, in particular) would be welcome, too. But overall, 280 Slides does enough to appeal to basic users, and it certainly presents the most intuitive user interface of them all.
Sample slideshow after the jump - it may break on Firefox 2…
Congrats to the 280North team - Using the app I find myself forgetting that I am on the web. From what I have seen they have some very exciting developments in store and are definitely going to shake things up.
Comic Sans?! Is this *really* TechCrunch?
Uh, am I the only one who can’t get the embedded slideshow to do a damn thing?
I get JS errors on this page on my FF. But a good online presentation tool is definitely messing
The slideshow finally loaded but when I click the next arrow it just scrolls my browser to the top of the techcrunch page… maybe they should have used flash.
Hey everyone - Thanks for the feedback! We’ve identified several bugs that we are actively working to fix. If you have any feedback please feel free to shoot us an email at feedback@280north.com.
280North is not the first Javascript based presentation tool. We built Prezentit a few months ago, and would love to hear what you think about it.
You can try it here http://prezentit.com/tryit
Right now we support IE7, Firefox, and safari. We’re working on adding support for more browsers as well.
@Fan — I was just about to mention the comic sans..
and I get the same “scrolls my browser to the top of the techcrunch page”
It looks nice but the UI just doesn’t seem to perform as well as SlideRocket. Does Flash have an advantage here over Javascript? It certainly seems to. It’s great to see that online productivity apps are coming of age and getting to the point where they can be used as serious business tools.
The embedded presentations have a few kinks to work out. Until then, you can view the same presentation here:
http://280slides.com/Viewer/?u.....fullscreen
JS Errors galore.
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I think more interesting than their slideshow product is the technology behind it. They gave the SF JS Meetup folks a breakdown at our first meet up earlier this year.
Any word on what’s going to become of that framework?
@Ross care to comment?
a solution looking for a problem. we have slideshows already on the web, we call them “web pages”. put a “next/prev” linkset on any web page…and bam! instant slideshow. “next” links are just hrefs. why do i need to see what all the pages in a chain of links look like?
export to ppt seems like an interesting feature no one cares about
@wayne pan — We’re definitely really excited about the framework, and we should have some more information to announce about it very soon. E-mail me if you want to talk more.
Isn’t this the application that bombed Paul Graham’s talk at Startup School? IIRC, he couldn’t get his slides to load at all.
Solution looking for a problem, imo. With problems of its own.
If anyone has tried either sliderocket or sproutbuilder, I think they’ll be disappointed in 280slides.
@Jack @jenni @everyone We know about the jumping to the top of the page issue, and have just pushed new code that should fix the problem.
@billy We had some initial hiccups, but our servers are running a lot more smoothly now. Hopefully the presentation is loading for you.
@Peter Urban, @Ali Shah I’d love to see the errors, feel free to email them to me at ross@280north.com. Some errors are actually expected, since some of the things we do are reported as errors in Firefox even though they really are not. Of course, we do know that there are some real bugs, and we’re working to squash them quickly.
@Max Appreciate the feedback, and I’d love to hear more about what felt sluggish to you. It’s true that flash has a bit of an upper hand, mostly because its compiled to bytecode and runs as a plugin. However, our framework, Cappuccino, rivals the speed of most flash applications, and we’re constantly making it faster.
@zm We did run Paul’s presentation at startup school, but our codebase has changed quite a bit since then. Actually, we wrote a custom version of the app for Paul, so technically this isn’t the same program, but your point is well taken. That’s why we baked downloading to powerpoint into the program so your presentation will always be ready for you offline and online
Comic Sans…really?
Quite an easy tool. Adding photos and videos is really easy (from a search box) and so is re-sizing and re-arranging. Rest of the stuff is very much apple like. I mean neat!!
How is it apple-like? Other than completely ripping off the GUI, it has virtually none of the functionality of Keynote. No charts, no tables, no animation, no transitions, no collaboration, no custom themes or backgrounds, no audio, etc. And it’s way too buggy for a public beta.
But, according to the article, keyboard shortcuts work so at least they’ve got that going for them, I guess…
Congrats to the 280Slides team! It’s a great web-based slide authoring tool , and it’s just amazing that it is 100% Javascript … it really feels much more like a desktop application than anything else.
Uh, am I the only one who can’t get the embedded slideshow to do a damn thing?
SlideRocket is a rich internet application (RIA)
The biggest news about 280 Slides has nothing to do with the application but everything to do with how they wrote it. The application is written in Objective-C which they they wrote an entire JavaScript wrapper/runtime for which you can read in their .j script files. Never seen .j files before? That’s because it’s brand new. What they call “Cappuccino” sounds way more exciting than what they actually made with it. Can’t wait for *that* to be released.
I agree with whoopie goldberg in #14; looks a lot like a solution looking for a problem. Does anyone really need this?
Framework does sound interesting and more of a product;
this app is just a demo of what you can do with the framework.
Congratulations on the launch, guys. Hanging out for some more Cappuccino news
Why oh why can’t any of these online tools support RTL languages… is it that difficult to accomplish?
I really enjoyed using the app. It really does feel like a desktop app.
Perhaps, the UI can be a little better in not being such an Keynote clone.
And I would love to see some kind of plugin system so that I can write my custom plugins to enhance the functionality.
Looking forward to Cappuccino going open source!