artpad

More creativity and more sharing and collaboration. Just more. I like it. Check it out for yourself at artpad.

Spresent

I saw this on one of my favorite vidcasts, geekbrief.tv. Spresent is a web-based presentation tool. I'm sure the world is super-saturated with powerpointesque presentations, I know I have sat through my fair share of terrible bullet screen after bullet screen. So there must be a need for these things, right? One need I would like to see more is pushing students to create presentations with these tools. And that is where something like Spresent might really come in handy. A student can share a presentation and collaborate with other students and when they are all finished, a simple publish button will send whoever an email with the finished product attached. Here is one I created for an introduction to the Flash interface.

There are some drawbacks, but this is still in beta, so with any luck these things will only get better. The most noticeable shortcoming was including images -- you need them uploaded to the web somewhere. They do offer Flickr integration, which seemed great, but for some reason, the interface did not function properly. In the end I had to upload the images to my personal site and link to them there.

I hope they make the powerpoint conversion feature part of the free service. Keep a watch on this one.