What is the best presentation tool for technical stuff?

Question

While recently exploring prezi I realized there have to be better tools than PowerPoint for presenting something, especially technical stuff. What differentiates technical stuff from other stuff in my opinion is the support of these features:

• be able to insert large code fragments
• scroll in code fragments
• annotate (highlight) text/code easily
• have several "steps", ie. on pressing a key, something is highlighted, displayed, moved, etc. (this is missing in prezi)
• include images with dynamic sources (eg. to include yuml diagrams)

Here is a great overview of alternatives, has anybody evaluated some?

Answer 1

I would say prezi! Especially because how you can show your code on it (as you already mentioned, and I don't really know any other presentation stuff who can do anything similar)

There's an interview with Facebook engineer Brian Shire about prezi

And some discussion on blogs about it.

See here and some ideas on how to use prezi here

Also techcrunch speaking about prezi

Answer 2

I was a fan of LaTeX Beamer for quite a while as it was pretty easy to write code with highlight, place annotations, perform progressive disclosure for better understanding, etc.

However, despite recognizing that Beamer was better for some tasks, namely when the presentation had to focus on code, currently I mainly use Powerpoint more because:

• I saw this quote somewhere in Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information where someone said that PowerPoint presentations were usually better than LaTeX ones because people would put less math in them (since it was harder to do good equations). The same principle applies to code most of the times...
• Doing stuff using PowerPoint is, despite its many drawbacks, usually faster and easier for me and would make it trivial for any of my peers to review and edit the presentation.

Anyway I'll surely take a look at that list of tools that you provided since sticking with what you already know is the true recipe for getting old :)