Jonathan Hensley | The Blog | JHensley.org

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.

Here are some interesting links from today:

• Steve Job Is Having Health Problems?
  Apple beat expectations for 3Q, but investors used a late trading session to punish shares of the Mac and iPhone maker after the company offered conservative forward-looking guidance and refused to comment on the health of chief executive Steve Jobs.
• Call Someone – Without Having To Talk To Them
  Boston-based MobileSphere launched a 'straight-to-voicemail' service yesterday called Slydial. If you listen to a short ad, you can then be connected to the voicemail inbox of any US mobile phone subscriber, without causing their phone to ring.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch thinks it can be a reality and he’s setting his sights on making it happen. I agree that it could be a great product if done correctly. However, I think it may be a while before decent components will be cheap enough to stay under the $200 goal.

I’m tired of waiting – I want a dead simple and dirt cheap touch screen web tablet to surf the web. Nothing fancy like the Dell latitude XT, which costs $2,500. Just a Macbook Air-thin touch screen machine that runs Firefox and possibly Skype on top of a Linux kernel. It doesn’t exist today, and as far as we can tell no one is creating one. So let’s design it, build a few and then open source the specs so anyone can create them.

Check out the rest of what Michael has to say about it.

Here are some interesting links from the past couple days:

• Hi-tech is turning us all into time-wasters
  the beeps notifying the arrival of email are said to be causing a 0.5 per cent drop in gross domestic product in the United States, costing the economy $70bn a year
• Computer mouse heading for extinction > News > PC Authority
  Are the Wii MotionPlus and iPhone examples of how we'll be using PCs in years to come? Experts say, the computer mouse is set to die out in the next five years and will be usurped by touch screens and facial recognition, analysts believe.

I’m a big baseball fan but this is the type of thing Major League Baseball does that drives me crazy.

On Monday Michigan’s Mark Knopper, owner and sole employee of Bulbous Ventures, received an email from MLB Advanced Media demanding that he remove baseball team logos from his program along with a nearly imperceptible MLB logo used on the application program shortcut. MLB Advanced Media also expressed concern people might wrongfully assume his program was an official MLB iPhone App. MLB also made available its own iPhone app on last week, MLB.com At Bat ($5).

iPhone App Maker Gets Hit With Major League Cease and Desist