Last night I made by talking debut in front of a small audience of local designers and developers at Colchester Digital’s monthly get together. I wanted to do things right and wanted to make some slides so I didn’t have to rely on just talking, I also hoped they would help me by prompting what I was actually talking about! If you were there, I’m sure you could tell I was a little bit nervous; DJ’ing to 1000+ people - no problem, talking to 20 - bag of nerves!

I didn’t want to invest in Keynote by Apple, just in case this was my one and only gig, so I set about looking for a free alternative - and I came across SlideRocket, a web app.

I signed up for the free version - aimed at the casual user and got stuck into putting together my slides. It’s a really neat application; very well designed and easy to use. There are themes and templates you can use, or you can just freestyle and create text and graphic elements.

I was intending to use the SlideRocket application you can download to view the slides as a presentation offline - but this is only available to paying customers. Damn! You can’t even export the slides as a PDF on the free version… but there’s a work around. You can publish the slide presentation as a public web version and from that you can print the slides as a PDF - whoop! 

So I just used Preview at full screen and flicked through the slides with the down cursor key.

I’ve not used Keynote and I’m sure SlideRocket is a fraction of what Keynote can do - but as a freebie, it did the job.