TUI UNIVERSITY

William Witt

Module 1 Session Long Project

CSC111: Foundations of Comp. and Program Design

Prof Santos Galvez

14 Feb 2011

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 Prezi

I spent about an hour working with the web based presentations tools on the Prezi website. The

application was complex enough to provide a rich experience, and simple enough to thouroughly

explore in that 6o minutes. Working with Prezi was an interesting experience at first. I found the

interface to be intuitive and easy to use. As a Linux user I appreciated the fact the site was compatible

with my system, and did not use crude user agent string checks to guess that my system might not be

compatible like some sites even though it is(e.g. turbotax.com). The look an feel of the presentations

created by Prezi were refreshingly dynamic. The fact that the presentations are available online with

almost no system prerequisites is outstanding. Unfortunately, this is where my positive impressions of

Prezi ended.

In my opinion most significant problem with Prezi is that once you create your presentation on

Prezi you are unable to to another service. This limitation is shared with most “web 2.0” applications,

and social networking sites. The second issue I have with Prezi is its need to be online inorder to fully

function. Because all video must be on youtube, all presentations with video must be done online with

a fast an reliable internet connection, this is a nonstarter for most business presentations that are given

away from home office. Additionally, Prezi utilizes and executable file instead instead of browser

rendered file to launch the offline presentation mode, again this a nonstarter in a government/corporate

environments where every application that is executed on the machine must be authorized. My third

criticism is that is is written in Adobe Flash, a closed technology that is is prone to crashing and

overusing system resources and has been plagued by security concerns in recent years. Finally, Prezi

is not open source software, as a result I find it more beneficial to funnel my time and energy into a

product that is like Open Office's Impress.

http://prezi.com/wio4dpwkdlmf/computer-science/

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 Scribd

My first experience with Scribd.com was a little unnerving. When I entered the site I was

automatically logged in using my Face Book credentials. In my opinion, it is unacceptable to utilize an

authentication cookie from another site as positive identification for a user. Either Scribd.com needs to

reevaluate their security posture, or Face Book needs to evaluate their privacy policy for allowing some

other site to authenticate against their systems using only a cookie . It is more likely the latter than the

former, so I will choose to blame Face Book to allowing the indiscretion. Overall, I can see a niche

market for Scribd where individuals can provide a marketplace of freely searched manuscript length

documents. This niche would not be filled by blogging software due to the formatting and

immutability requirements in tings like white papers, scientific papers, and books. Additionally, unlike

many other online applications Scribd has a fast and reliable method for retrieval of documents posted,

either as text or PDF. Unfortunately, this advantage is only of marginal benefit because you must use

some other application to produce the documents in the first place.

Overall the I was not impressed with Scridb's ability to handle uploaded documents. I

attempted to upload MS Word, Acrobat, and Open Document formatted files all of which failed. In an

effort to have a link to provide for this assignment, I uploaded a plain text and rich text document both

of which succeeded. In contrast, Google Docs allowed all five formats with only minor formatting

differences. Herein lies the problem this the niche Scribd occupies, Google could replace scribd with a

couple extra settings in Google Docs and a targeted search, similar to Google Books. I personally

foresee either a buyout or obsolescence in Scribd's future.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/49608567/ITM434-Module-1-CS

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 Posterous

Posterous is a site I wanted to like, but I can't. It's a web front end on a micro-blogging client,

and these have been done and redone in standalone form for the last 5+ years that twitter and identi.ca

have been on the scene. The single most unsatisfactory aspect of Posterous is the default method, and

their gimmick, is the ability to post via email using an easily discoverable incoming address while only

authenticating against the “from” line in your email. Posterous markets themselves as gateway to

Twitter and Face Book, but I wouldn't trust login credentials to a company that honestly trusts email

headers as an authentication source. To contrast, Face Book has a similar feature, but uses a randomly

generated email address instead of the user's username. Face Book's feature is not is not impervious to

targeted attack, but takes substantially more skill than Posterous. The bottom line for me and

Posterous is that I will be closing my account immediately following grading of this assignment, I feel

unsafe even having an account on their site.

http://unamanic.posterous.com/

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