Presentations with reveal.js

Old-­fash­ioned PP­T’s pre­sen­ta­tions are from the 90’s, and let’s face it, we are in the age of the web brows­er. So, the last time I had to gave a talk, I de­cid­ed to use a bet­ter tech­ni­cal sup­port.

Af­ter a quick search for al­ter­na­tives, I found many op­tion­s, in­clud­ing well-­known li­braries, un­til I fi­nal­ly de­cid­ed for re­veal.js.

It is writ­ten in JavaScript with good CSS themes, and it does not re­quire ex­pert knowl­edge on those tech­nolo­gies. In or­der to play the pre­sen­ta­tion, you launch an HTML file from a web brows­er or you can al­so run it with a stat­ic serv­er.

Ad­van­tages:

  • Ver­­sion con­trol: Giv­en the fact that your pre­sen­­ta­­tion is made from source code, it is pos­si­ble to track changes by us­ing git.

  • A bet­ter cross-­­plat­­form sup­­port: it does not re­­ly on a par­tic­u­lar soft­­ware in a par­tic­u­lar ver­­sion to be present (web browsers are ubiq­ui­­tous nowa­­days).

  • Com­­pat­i­­bil­i­­ty: WYSI­WYG.

  • Able to host your pre­sen­­ta­­tion in the cloud and ac­cess it from any­where.

Rea­sons to use it / nice things about it:

  • We are in 2014

  • Sup­­ports Mark­­down lan­guage

To be clear: I am not say­ing that this is a bet­ter al­ter­na­tive be­cause is new­er of mod­ern, but be­cause of the ad­van­tages list­ed. In oth­er word­s, if we count with de­vel­oped tools at our dis­pos­al, it would be a good idea to use them.

Here are some sim­ple and ba­sic ex­am­ples of pre­sen­ta­tions I am work­ing on. (DIS­CLAIMER: they might be in dif­fer­ent lan­guages, and the page is in pro­gress).