I was looking through del.icio.us today, and I came across a website called ThumbStacks.

ThumbStacks is an presentation/slideshow-making online service which appears to use a mix of Java and Ajax. The site, at the moment, is in public alpha. This should mean the site is unstable, but I actually find it to be less crash-prone to the only other such site I’ve used; ThinkFree Office Online.

When you first come across the site you notice a really light, simple and yet effective. The header and text colours are not perhaps the most consistent (black and light blue), they are light on the eyes and not overwhelming. The layout is very simple; the menu’s on the top right and the usual copyright, contact information and the like are in the page’s footer.

To create a presentation you simply press Presentation Builder and it takes you to an interface where you have two slides already set-up (one been the title slide) in a very basic template (which you can later change). Though it, to be honest, doesn’t look much at first; it grows on you.

At the top of the page you have the usual buttons such as save, open, new, print, play as; well as the formatting buttons such as font, font type, colours, size, bullets and alignment. On the left hand side you have thumbnails of all the slides. And the active slide occupies the majority of the page. This is very similar to offline slideshow tools such as MS PowerPoint.

When you right click on a slide, you get given the option to add a text box, image and most interestingly a Flickr photo. I think I may have spotted a bug though, as when it says to configure your Flickr account in the Slide Builder, the link doesn’t work (however, if you get the location you can go to it manually). However, once you have done this you may add a photo from your public photos, browsing manually or searching through tags. Also, it states Add Plugin and under that is has an arrow. To me, this shows a future chance of customisation.

Custom animation and transitions are fairly limited (five types for bullets), as are themes (they’re only four). However, in all realism you can’t expect much more from a free, pre-stable product.

Also, minor features it uses do impress. One example is the autosave, which will no doubt at some point save people hours worth of lost data. Another example is when you drag an object, a faint version stays in place in it’s previous location until it’s dropped. One final example is when you use your mouse to select an area it uses nice colours and transparency.

Once you’ve finished creating a slideshow, you can then export it to HTML or store it on their servers. That is probably the main flaw; no import/export of PowerPoint presentations. This makes matters hard when you need a copy on an off-line PC/Mac.

It is possible to share your presentation in a remote meeting with five other users. A URL is generated, though I doubt there is a chat interface. Personally, I dislike this limit of five, as I can’t really now post a link to my show here.

Despite my criticisms, the service is supreme to some of it’s online rivals and though it is inferior to PowerPoint in many ways; the price tag has me leaning towards ThumbStacks.

Update: According to Duncan actually there’s a publish option, which provides a link for an unlimited amount of people to use. So now, you can view my presentation here. 11/4/06

Tags: powerpoint, thumbstacks, ajax, java, web 2.0, web2, web2.0, internet, website, service, productivity