Born: June 9, 1972
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September 09, 2008 at 08:00 am
Maemo Summit, 10 days and counting...
Maemo Summit is almost here! I leave for Berlin next Tuesday and will arrive just a little late for the beginning of OSiM World. Upon arrival in Berlin, Eric Warnke (aka Brontide) and I are going to try to meet up at the airport so that we can share a cab to our hotels… This is pretty exciting!
I’m almost finished with my presentation for“Saturday”:http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Summit_2008#Saturday_20 , at 1:30p. I’ve been using the Google Docs Presentation app, with the expectation that’d I’d later export it as a PDF for use at the summit. Admittedly, this application still has many issues…
- Text editing is far from perfect
- Sometimes old typographical information is retained within a text element unless you clear the style before changing it (or, sometimes a text element must be recreated from scratch of you can’t get new style to take)
- Serif-ized text (i.e., setting a text element to “Normal/Serif”) is not retained when saving the presentation
- Image manipulation is nearly impossible (one example is that there is no way to numerically resize a graphic)
- Placing elements on the screen is tricky
- It’s difficult to see the black element marques on dark backgrounds
- Element placement doesn’t seem to be pixel-perfect
- Graphical elements can be moved with the arrow buttons, but textual elements cannot
- Exporting to PDF introduces all sorts of placement errors (i.e., elements in the PDF are placed in different locations as they are in Google Docs)
- Duplicated slides sometimes retain elements from the original slide, even after deleting all of the elements on the slide (even if you can’t see the element on the duplicated slide, it can show up when you view the presentation or export it to PDF)
- The drag-and-drop functionality for organizing slides is helpful, but sometimes gets mixed-up when the section’s scroll bar is dragged and released (e.g., releasing the scroll bar can auto-select a slide, as if the slide was clicked and dragged)
Anyway, I could go on… But, overall, I’m happy that I used this method for creating the presentation. Not only was I able to keep everything online — for editing anywhere — but it creates a document that will eventually be accessible by anyone who wants to see it.
As a side note, it’s important to say that Google Docs Presentation does an amazing job of importing PowerPoint documents. I just wish it could import ODP files!
I’m looking forward to my short time in Berlin. I’m looking forward to Maemo Summit even more.
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Comments (5)
@Benoît: Arg! It’s amazing that these issues still exist. I wonder if not very many people actually use Google Docs for more than just showing off…
Google Docs works perfectly with Google Chrome.
