Jonathan Hensley | The Blog | JHensley.org

Here’s a video of Microsoft’s new Sphere.  It’s basically a spherical Microsoft Surface.

I finally got my SlideRocket Invite last night.  I saw their demo a couple weeks ago.

My first impression after having a bit to play with it is pretty good.  They’re still calling it a “Preview” which is more like an alpha version.  They actually warn you when first logging in that there still may be issues.  It didn’t take me long to see why they have the warning.  Most of the functionality is working correctly but I did experience several glitches when working with the slide components, text and graphics.

The biggest thing I noticed was my laptop fan kicking on very soon after opening a new presentation in edit mode.  Turns out SlideRocket is pretty CPU intensive using up 60% of my Core 2 Duo 2.2Ghz processor and Firefox was consuming double the RAM I’ve seen since upgrading to 3.0.  Firefox was sluggish at times and even froze for over a minute on multiple occasions.

All in all though I’d have to say I’m very impressed so far.  The menus were totally different than traditional presentation software but were pretty intuitive and easy to navigate.  SlideRocket is definitely feature rich especially when compared to PowerPoint and creates much more powerful graphics in a lot less time.

Here’s a little slideshow I threw together showcasing some of the transitions, text effects and things.