Glide Present 2.0

Transmedia's Glide Present 2.0 has overtaken Google's presentation software as our favourite Web-based alternative to Microsoft's PowerPoint.

Glide Present 2.0 from Transmedia outclasses Google's offering in more ways than one. Though the interface is a tad cluttered and page loads can sometimes be slow, Glide Present 2.0 lives in a collaborative ecosystem (called Glide OS 2.0) that matches Google's. TransMedia claims that Glide OS is the first online operating system.

You can invite others to view and collaborate on your presentations via e-mail, over instant messaging, and from your contact list. Unlike Google, which only lets you share your work with other Google users, Glide has no such limitations.

To use Glide is free for up to four users with up to 2GB of storage. For $US4.95 a month -- or $US49.95 a year -- you can sign up for Glide Premium. This package is for up to 24 users with up to 10GB of storage. Further storage costs $US4.95 a month ($US49.95 a year) for each unit of 10GB. There's reasonably swift registration process, and then you're in.

The Glide Presenter application opens in a full-screen browser window (Adobe's Flash Player is required) and features clearly marked menu items across the top. From the main screen, you can add slides with a click and import videos from the management system, which Glide hosts.

Unlike Google's presentation app, Glide Present 2.0 lets you upload multiple images or audio/video files at once, and large media files can stream within presentations, even on low-bandwidth mobile devices.

Whereas Google enables only text and images in presentations and offers no support for exporting presentations to other formats, Glide Present 2.0 lets you save and serve presentations on a variety of platforms (Windows, Mac and Linux machines are supported), as well as save and convert presentations to PowerPoint format or PDF. In our tests, a Glide-created presentation converted to PDF without a glitch