Plainview – a dream for presentations

I don’t know how many people follow the work from the The Barbarian Group, but they produce some pretty amazing things, including Magnetosphere, a visualizer for iTunes which has been rebuild and shipped as one of the new visualizers in the latest versions of iTunes. 

Not surprisingly these extremely cool people have built some other extremely cool things, including a little OS X app called Plainview. 

Plainview fills a very specific need allowing web based developers and designers to showcase, present and demo their work within the medium it is designed to be used. The best description comes from the Barbarian site:

We Barbarians give a lot of presentations. A lot of speeches. A lot of Dog and Pony shows. People want to see our work. And the work we do is on the Internet. And, until now, we really had two options for showing our Internet work: we could capture it all to Quicktime, and throw it into Powerpoint or Keynote, so we could present in a nice full-screen mode that looked professional, or we could try to show it in the browser, and have all that ugly chrome distracting people from our beautiful sites. Both of these options had their pros and cons – full-screen looks sweet, but you lose the interactivity of the site, everything has to be canned. And showing things in a browser lets you show the site’s interactivity, but, again, that ugly chrome.

So now we have a third option. Fire up your full-screen browser and let your audience focus on the work.

You can find more information and download a copy from here. 

So if you happen to be on a Mac go and grab a copy of Plainview and give it a go, it might just make that next client meeting a lot easier.