insta-deck

Earlier this year at Startup School I noticed quite a few speakers using very simple slide shows, namely a piece of text and a big image of sorts. One speaker even admitted that he created his slides on a whim by searching Google Images. I told myself I'd create a quick-and-dirty utility to create this type of presentation.

This is where I was going to say that last I checked, Google Images doesn't have an API but it looks like they have an experimental one now (more info). Anyway, Flickr has an API, and you could argue that it has more "interesting" images. The other part of the equation is the slide show framework itself. There are probably plenty out there, but I went with S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System by Eric Meyer. Put the two together and you get insta-deck. It needs a better name, but it's quick-and-dirty, as promised. There's no edit functionality, because that would just slow you down. I'm sure there are plenty of bugs in there instead.

Here's an example of what it produces. Share your creations/problems in the comments.