Opensource |

Looking for the 'perfect' presentations' solution (for me)

Sat, 08 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

During the last 10 years in various contexts due to my job as a lecturer: either lectures for my students, conferences, workshops or even much more informal events, usually speaking about cities, commons, or accessibility. I enjoy it because I love sharing knowledge with others but also because it is when I am preparing presentations (by summarising and highlighting the main topics or thinking of the storytelling) where I reflect and learn the most. It is for that reason that I am always looking for the right software that allows me to create appealing slides in a relatively fast way. In this post, I will be sharing some of the decisions I have made and the results I got regarding that matter.

In order to prepare my presentations I have used and tested several presentation softwares and services, such as the classic Powerpoint, LibreOffice Impress ( ), Google Slides or, Prezi ( , ). All of them are really good pieces of software and you can create great presentations with them. However, as time goes by, I have become more concerned with techno-politics and data autonomy on the one hand, and with efficiency on the other. As a result, I have come to outline the following list of requirements that my software of choice should have:

It must allow me to own my (own) data and to easily reuse and share it with others for any purpose.
It should be opensource.
It must allow offline editing and displaying.
It must allow adding content without having to worry about formatting it. Ideally, I should be able to write in plain text or markdown (or the like) which will later be formatted and converted into a final good-looking format. I want to focus on adding content very fast for scaffolding it: I want to edit it in plain text or markdown.
It should look good (uh!)

So, with those requirements in mind, I started to look for candidates that would fit in those selection criteria. After a while, I ended up with the following shortlist¹:

: a conventional desktop software for presentations. It is opensource and multiplatform and it is part of the LibreOffice suite.
: a presentation framework based on the power of CSS3 transforms and transitions in modern browsers and inspired by the idea behind prezi.com. It allows moving through an infinite canvas, like the former, but also in 3D!
: an HTML presentation framework. Halfway between the two others, as it creates slides’ decks that can be opened with any web browser with a two-axis’ navigation (unlike regular presentation software that only allows linear navigation).

Let’s see how the competitors behave regarding each of my requirements:

	LO Impress	impress.js	reveal.js
# 1: Own data	Yes	Yes	Yes
# 2: FLOSS	Yes	Yes	Yes
# 3: Offline	Yes (ODP or PDF)	Yes (Local html)	Yes (Local html file or PDF)
# 4: Format-hassle-free	No (although using styles makes things easier and are almost as valid workaround)	Yes, using	Yes (multiple approaches)
# 5: Appealing	With effort	Somewhat	Yes!

And now, let me further elaborate this summary table.

LibreOffice Impress

LibreOffice is a traditional desktop software that could be considered as the opensource replacement for Powerpoint. It creates regular slides’ deck and offers several templates with designs and layouts. Although I acknowledge that from LO foundation have put an effort into designing new templates and the stock defaults have improved dramatically, I cannot but help to consider that they still look somewhat oldies/traditional. However, I also admit that this is a completely subjective matter and can be fixed by either or by creating our own. After all, and to be completely honest, I have done so for many years.

Since it is a regular desktop software that means that it has to be installed in your computer if you want to edit your presentation. But if you do not have it installed, you can use any of the many softwares capable of reading ODP format, which is an open ISO standard or you can bring your own that can be run from a USB stick or the like without installing it in the computer. But if you only want to visualize the presentation, you can always export to PDF using the built-in feature (just one click), which is always an insurance that your presentation will always look the way you wanted it to be (custom fonts, I am looking at you!).

In order to add content you need to create text boxes, insert images, tables… add transitions, slides… using its GUI. This may seem a good thing, as it allows you to easily align objects and modify them on the fly. However, in my experience I found that approach to be very time consuming, as it often requires resizing objects, changing text-sizes, aligning, changing image properties… The good news is that LibreOffice’s styles are a really powerful tool when used correctly. Styles allow customizing anything we want, starting from layouts but also paragraph styles, lists, images, tables… It may take some time to customize every style, but once you’re done, it pays the effort: all your objects will look consistently and exactly the way you want without doing anything else. And if you ever change your mind… they will update automatically, preserving their consistency. Great, isn’t it?!

Another inconvenient for me is that it is not easy to work with media other than images (like videos, websites, maps…), especially if they are not stored locally or require some interaction.

Pros:

✅ Ease of use
✅ Compatibility (in terms of format an collaboration)
✅ Customization
✅ Risk-free: export to PDF for your peace of mind
✅ Presenter’s console

Cons:

❌ Content editing is time consuming
❌ No GIFs! or other interactive media
❌ Outdated (default) appearance from the 90s
❌ Only linear presentations

Impress.js

Clic on the text and use arrows to browse the presentation

I have to admit that I love Prezi because, unlike all the others, instead of working with independent slides that are displayed linearly, you can work with an infinite canvas that works at different scales at the same time. This allows plenty of completely different possibilities: you can literally go from the big picture to the smallest of the details. Or even the other way round: you can start with details that slowly conform a broader reality. Or, if you want, you can also use traditional slides. Everything seemed perfect, except that it is not opensource and all your data is locked in a closed platform and does not comply with any of my requirements.

A sample presentation I did for Digital Tools' course at Universidad San Jorge using Prezi

Admittedly, I am so in love with it that I did my best looking for a good replacement. After discarding I discovered . Impress.js is a framework that benefits from Javascript and CSS3 properties and transitions that can virtually mimic Prezi in everything (plus the addition of being able to add 3D transitions and transformations). Since it produces HTML files, they can be opened by any web browser and can include any type of media (even other embedded websites!). Also, it means that anything can be tweaked by using CSS. However, writing HTML is far from being fast, as it requires a lot of tags that need to be opened and closed.

The good news is that there is ! Hovercraft lets you write your content in , which is very similar to markdown and, hence, very fast to write and read and it converts your text into a fully functional impress.js’ website. It really has the good features of the two worlds, as it combines ease of editing with impressive results.

The only drawback is that it is not easy to create custom navigations (eg. following a path) nor to tweak the default (and basic) CSS styles².

Pros:

✅ Non-linear presentations
✅ Easy to add content by writing RST files
✅ Can be displayed in any web browser
✅ Presenter’s console
✅ Accepts any type of media

Cons:

❌ Basic CSS styles
❌ Difficult to edit paths
❌ You need to have hovercraft installed in your computer to create the output files
❌ I have not succeeded in achieving the same results as with Prezi (in terms of navigation, expressiveness and story-telling)

Reveal.js

And here it comes my currently preferred software for creating my presentations: Reveal.js. Like Impress.js it is a framework that creates an html file (with some javascript to do its magic -hence the .js suffix) that can be displayed in any device with a web browser. Also, since it follows HTML and CSS standards, and it is responsive by default, this means that can be seen in any computer, tablet or smartphone, with minor differences³.

Another feature I like a lot about reveal.js is that whereas it does not allow to design custom and complex paths like impress.js it allows using nested slides, which provides two-axis of displacement: you can move to the right-left like in regular slides’ decks and also top-down. This means that, when used wisely and consistently, it provides plenty of visual resources, which is very useful for communication purposes (at least for all of those who, like me, have a very visual memory).

Also, since it is relatively new, and it is a very popular opensource project with many contributors⁴ I find their slides to be very appealing and contemporary. And talking about its appearance, reveal.js can be customized in several ways: either changing the transitions between the slides and/or choosing from one of the several default themes (all of which look quite good) or easily customize them (or even create our own) by using .scss language, as I did below:

A presentation I made using reveal.js for the Urban Studies I course at Universidad San Jorge. You can see it [fullscreen here](https://ccamara.github.io/slides/02-Greek-roman-cities) (which is where it shines!)

I know what you may be thinking now: “But hey! you’ve talked about .html, .css, .js and .scss, which are languages that are quite verbose and therefore it does not comply with your requirement #4, as writing a presentation in .html can be really cumbersome.” You’re right. And wrong. While this is true by default, the good news is that there are several ways to write in markdown, a language that I have come to love due to its simplicity, speed and versatility (in fact, this whole website is written in markdown). But since there are several ways to do it and this has resulted in an already long post, I will talk about it in an upcoming one.

Pros:

✅ Can be displayed in any web browser
✅ Looks great (nice default SCSS templates, which can be easily extended)
✅ Presenter’s console (you know, with a timer, presenter notes and next-slide preview)
✅ Accepts any type of media
✅ Can create sections and sub-sections
✅ Easy to add content by writing in markdown plain text (there are many approaches to generate the HTML files from plain text -more on that in an upcoming blog post)

Cons:

❌ Not for everyone (may not be ideal if you are to collaborate with other people not familiar with markdown, html, css, git…) (but hey! there is also an as a freemium service)
❌ Requires some time to set up
❌ May not look the same in every device
❌ PDF export requires Chrome/Chromium, and still doesn’t look as nice as the original

I am also aware of the existence of other solutions that may meet my requirements, but I haven’t had the time to try them out, such as or . If you happen to know more that may fit on my requirements, please feel free to share them with me in the comments. ↩︎
You can see some of the attempts I made on . ↩︎
The truth is that depending on the screen resolution and the use of custom fonts, the result may differ slightly (or greatly). ↩︎
At the time of writing this post, 255 different people have contributed to reveal.js in more than 2,400 different commits. Source: ↩︎

Digital Privacy Workshop: a chronicle

Sat, 01 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Last Friday, I attended to a workshop aimed to discuss, learn and raise awareness on our Digital Privacy, organized by , a group of “feminist cybersecurity advocates and researchers seeking to engage with groups excluded from tech”. I didn’t know much about the event nor the organizers when I signed up, but I was sure I would enjoy it. As an opensource advocate who is also concerned about how our private data can be (and it is) used by companies and governments, I was seduced by the topic and, above all, by their feminist approach as well as their hybrid profile, halfway between activism and academia. These two topics would soon be made evident.

We were first welcomed by a group of very friendly people who handed out an information sheet, introducing themselves and the event, and a participant agreement which we had to return signed if we wanted to take part into the research they are conducting. Because, yes, as they (sorry for not remembering your names, guys) soon explained at the welcome speech, the workshop was also part of an action-research¹ project within the , funded by a research grant from UK Research & Innovation. As they kindly and thoroughly explained, this meant that we could opt to contribute to the research by sharing our opinions and data. I was positively surprised on their feminist approach (as they stated it) in dealing with that, not only they were very transparent, but they also offered options for those willing to take part into the workshop while not taking part into the research, which I believe is a very coherent behaviour due to the topic (after all they would be dealing with private data). Kudos for them!

Soon after the introduction, we participated in an open discussion through a questionnaire we could interact with in real-time through , in which we assessed our demographics (we were around 20 people from all ages -more on gender below), motivations, prior knowledge on the topic and concerns on digital privacy. This last question led to the next phase, in which we divided into smaller groups, where an IT person took note of our interventions and answered the questions that arose, to further discuss our fears and interests. After this first round of discussion, we were introduced to the , a really thorough yet accessible guide written by Noah Kelley from which introduces the foundations of key areas and provides a series of free/libre tools grouped around the following topics: Anonymity, Hacking, Data, Phones, and Social. At a personal level it helped me to understand the insides of tools that I was already using, such a , tools I knew existed, such as , or simply learnt of the existence of new and intersting ones such as .

The last part of the workshop consisted of several focus groups (some of which -for those who agreed to take part in the research- were recorded) in which a researcher introduced several topics (like how do we feel regarding cybersecurity, how should be the best app/service for us? ) which we discussed between us and in turn opened new related topics such as security and gender and age, the role of governments and companies… I really enjoyed this part, as thorough the questions and answers we had profound discussions that I had honestly never thought about before so specifically. From time to time, we made short breaks to share some conclusions with the other groups and what people had written on the screen through the menti app. To make things even better, pizza was served for us all!

So that’s grosso modo, how a group of around 20 people spent 3 hours on a Friday evening talking, learning and sharing on cybersecurity, and data privacy and, most of all, having a great time together. As I said before, I was certain that I would enjoy the workshop, but I have to admit that it was completely different from what I had expected and, as a result, it was much better than I thought. At this point, I would like to thank Reconfigure for the organization of the event and wish them great success with their research. I am willing to know more about it, about them and about their results (and will be also willing to take part in it if there is a chance).

Some random thoughts before finishing:

All the attendees (except me) were females, a demographic which is completely reverse to any other event on technology or cybersecurity that I have previously attended to. While I liked that, I could not help but wonder if the fact that the event was labelled as “feminist” not only encouraged women to come but also discouraged men to do so. If that was true, that’s definitely something we (men) need to address to understand that feminism is not something alien to us but also concerns us all.
The organizers made a great effort on creating a safe-space where nobody could feel threatened or treated with contempt. In that regard, I found their approach on the topic of cybersecurity to be very appropriate given their context, goals and audience: instead of having an expert lecturing us on cybersecurity issues, we had a more peer-to-peer experience in which we all learnt from the others as equals. This is also novel in terms that usually cybersecurity issues are treated as common-sense rules which are anything but common and users are blamed by default for any “wrong” behaviour that can lead to security breaches.
The place (Oxford’s ) provided just the right atmosphere for such an event.
The pizzas were delicious! (probably that contributed to the fact that they were soon devoured).
At a personal level, I also enjoyed the fact that my partner also attended to the workshop (in fact, it was her who told me about the workshop, so thank you for doing so!) and since she was in another group, we kept the conversation even after we left the workshop. This means not only that we both enjoyed it but that Reconfigure made a great job with their workshop, so thanks again for that!

I didn’t know about it when I signed up, and this was a very positive surprise. Since I have had the opportunity to design (and to take part into) an action-research project on urban mobility and disabilities (you can read about it ), I considered very positive to learn from other fellow colleagues who come from a very different context. ↩︎