S5: Software - Office - Presentation

For years, I've looked for a PowerPoint replacement (possibly as part of a software suite), and I've always felt that HTML had a lot of promise for simple and platform-independent presentations. S5 1.1 has reached that point of simplicity! I used S5, in the public domain, at the very last minute last week, and I think it was faster than Keynote! S5 is not really software and is not platform-specific. (Cross-platform but not slow or ugly is a real bonus for me. My desk at work has Mac, Linux, Solaris, Windows, and a KVM.) S5 is a bundle of web pages containing one HTML file for you to edit, and some intelligently modular CSS files with other supporting files (JavaScript and images) for the appearance themes all hiding in a directory that you can ignore. S5 is so easy to use that I think it's easiest to write the HTML yourself! I store the minimal code for a new slide in iClip, and I can write a presentation very naturally. I start every presentation with an outline for organization. That text transfers easily to S5. I'm tempted to write an OmniOutliner-to-S5 translator, but I think that might make the process harder than necessary! If you do want to add a layer of redirection that's probably not as simple, look at adding docutils and reST; however, that's what convinced me that an OmniOutliner-to-S5 would be harder than S5 on its own. If you looked at S5 1.0, look again: JavaScript has made S5 significantly easier to use. All browsers should support this framework (although MSIE might be ugly, ha ha). Now that I've seen S5, it seems obvious to use CSS to separate the content from the display. Such a logical use of CSS! So it's not surprising that Eric Mayer of O'Reilly CSS fame wrote S5.

Since PDF is another tempting target after web, I might check some other projects like Prosper and PythonPoint in ReportLab periodically, but S5 was the first to cross my simplicity threshold.