Seth Godin's idea - THIS is a killer app

I doquite a few presentations & I'm somewhat software agnostic, using both Powerpoint and Keynote, since I view me talking as the centerpiece of the presentation and the slidedeck as being simply the juice that makes the whole thing seem professional and, yeah, a little jazzy.

I've been thinking for a while that it would be great to have some way to organize slides on the fly - my vision was to have all of the slides in a single deck, maybe organized in a tree format or in folders arranged by topic.  The reason being that it's more useful to the participants (and more fun) if you can skip around during a presentation and address questions as they come up.  If you're in touch with your audience, you'll often see that some rat holes are worthy of exploring with this particular audience and other avenues that maybe you'd thought about touching on are best left alone for the day.  You have to really know your material and make an effort to interact a lot with the audience to make sure you know their background, if they're following the discussion/conversation and what their level of interest is (I should say most of my presentations are on fairly technical topics and I don't always know the audience's exact level of expertise beforehand).

Anyway, my vision was of having a way I could see the index or tree of all of the slides in the slide deck on my screen, while showing individual slides on the screen the audience sees & then I'd be able to skip around on the fly and integrate the answers to audience questions seamlessly (hopefully) into the discussion. {Yeah, I know that Powerpoint let's you hyperlink jumps into a single slide, but I'm thinking about something on a more top-down view).

But, Seth Godin talks in this post about something much much much better.  The idea of having all the pages arranged in a grid or a checkerboard where you could select the next slide or series of slides via a touchscreen interface while talking is easier and better than what I was thinking about.  It would make it very very easy to not just skip around but to organize whole sections of the presentation on the fly.  What a great vision - I wish I'd thought of it.  I wish I knew enough about programming to write it.  The software he describes is worth $500 all by itself, forget the iPad - I'd pay separately for that.  Someone hurry.

Comments

[Jay]

perhaps if Powerpoint just had a way to jump from slide sorter view directly to slideshow view it would be a step in the right direction...

[Gary Bronga]

The presenter would be able to see several Emoticons to see how the presentation is going by the audience.

[David Hess]

Did anyone ever actually build and deliver a Talking Pad application? Or anything close?