Prezi and Me

Love growing cold

I’ve been a Prezi user pretty much right from the public launch and I’ve loved it. It was new, fresh, and surprising. Even if the presentation itself wasn’t great, Prezi alone would save it.

Over the years my presentations changed and grew, but Prezi wouldn’t grow into the same direction. But what am I missing?

• Search: Some of my Prezis are pretty big — multi-day trainings with hundreds of path elements. It’s a royal pain in the butt to scroll around such a presentation, looking for a specific keyword. You know what you’re looking for, but there’s just no way to efficiently find it.
  There was a search-prototype quite a while back, but it never made it into the final product.
• Intelligent printing: In the beginning and for quite some time thereafter, there was no way to print a Prezi — except for manually taking screenshots of every path element. Luckily, a print function was added some time ago. However, it’s probably the dumbest printing possible — it only takes screenshots. This means no search again and it’s impossible to copy-paste anything. “Great” for technical teaching material when twenty people need retype commands by hand.
  Of course you can do an OCR scan of the PDF yourself, which will embed the underlying text as an invisible layer. However, this is both tedious and takes quite a lot of time as well as being error prone; wrong quotation marks once enraged a group of students when they tried to copy code snippets.
  Of course Prezi could embed the text itself since it can simply access the original input; no additional software or manual work required and perfect results. I added a feature request specifically for this a year ago, but it wasn’t deemed necessary.
• SVG support: SVG is a great format — standardized, scalable, small file-size, editable with a text-editor,… There’s been a public feature request for more than four years, but basically no one cares.

Ok, so what did happen during the last few years? Probably not too much:

• Offline editor: The editor was rewritten multiple times. I’m sure there were good technical reasons for that, but I’ve never seen any major improvements for me as a user. The latest version is now managing Prezis for you, which is nice. However, it is hiding the PEZ files somewhere internally and you need to explicitly export them, which is a major turn-off. I like to keep the PEZ files in my directory structure where they belong and where I know that they are being backup up (I’m not necessarily uploading every presentation).
• Mobile: There are now iPhone and iPad apps (no Android support as far as I know). However, I really don’t care for it personally — I don’t do seminar, conference, or training presentations on mobile devices. In general, the iPad version might be nice for a quick presentation for a very small audience, but the iPhone?! And embedding Prezis into your website is most likely a dead end (been there, done that) since people can only see anything with the app; if they happen to use Apple products. So it’s definitely the wrong technology for general content.

So who’s the target audience of or main use case for Prezis? I’m not sure, but obviously not me. Time to get back to Keynote or one of the HTML presentation frameworks for web stuff, which is kind of sad, since I really liked the canvas approach to keep the big picture in mind. But Prezi definitely didn’t deliver to stay ahead of the rest during the last few years and the wow-effect has dried up…