Its Murphy’s law - if you are looking for a tool, you will find it as soon as the chance to use that tool has passed! This is exctly what has happened.As I mentioned, this week I presented on Web 2.0 at work - which seemed to go down so well that I have already been asked to repeat it for our business partners! On top of that, I’m also moving to a new role which will be much more focused on AJAX/Flex/RIA’s, but I digress… What I wanted to be able to do was to create a presentation which would run in my Web browser, making it easier for me to demo things (my demo’s would be part of the slides) and also show off some Web 2.0 stuff at the same time.Now if I owned a Mac I’m sure I would have just used Keynote, but unfortunately that is not an option (yet!).At a recent workshop, the presenter was using S5, a slideshow built using XHTML/CSS/JavaScript, enhanced by script.aculo.us to provide some nice visual effects. I liked how that approach came across so investigated. Not bad, but one thing really struck me - to build the presentation I was editing the HTML directly. It worked, but it added an overhead onto the process, and made it difficult when it came to more complex slides with a few images/diagrams. So, I put S5 to one side and made it in Powerpoint, not my idea format as I wanted to integrate a few demo’s, but very quick to create. The time came, and I just Alt-tabbed to Firefox.Yesterday, I find what would have been the ideal solution, a Web application called ThumbStacks, which lets you create and host Web based presentations. The difference between this and S5 (aside from the fact that Thumbstacks offers hosting/meeting/collaboration features) is the fact that it also has a brilliant presentation builder. It works just like Powerpoint, its simple and lets you create powerful layouts. It also lets you do nifty stuff such as importing graphics from your Flickr account etc.Its lacking a few things like slide transitions/animations which I think some people would find helpful. But, I’m hopeful that they will be inculded in an upcoming update. (Hint for developers: take a look at script.aculo.us, moo.fx and/or Lightbox). And I will definately be using ThumbStacks for future presentations! (more…)