280Slides is something new, though a one-line description may not get that across well. On the surface it’s like many other web-based browser apps that let you create a slide presentation, in the image of PowerPoint for Windows or Pages for the Macintosh. Many services, including Google Docs and Microsoft Live Office, do the same thing, and they do it for the same deliciously attractive price of nothing. None does it with anywhere near the flare of 280Slides, however.

Here’s an example of a presentation I just created using 280Slides:

280Slides is different all the rest because despite its beta status, it is the first in-browser app that feels every bit as slick as a desktop app from one of the big guys. It doesn’t have PowerPoint’s massive, industrial-strength feature set. What it does include, however, is what most of us need 95% of the time we make presentations, plus a few extras. My favorite features are:

• Unbeatably simple integration with SlideShare.net, allowing you to publish your presentation to a high-ranked site in seconds
• Awesome text editing
• Ability to insert pictures and videos into a presentation
• Even has Speaker’s notes
• Supports the Google Chrome browser
• Saves to PowerPoint, PDF, and OpenDocument (the one thing that didn’t seem to work in the beta)

This is the most mature early beta of a product I have ever encountered. They hit the sweet spot between size of feature set and ease of learning. Only Apple manages to do the same thing the first time out, and only in their iPhone and desktop apps, certainly now browser apps.

Browser apps can’t save files to your computer. It’s a security risk. 280Slides gets around this problem by silently saving files to its own server. I don’t know what the maximum you can store is, but my PowerPoint decks are usually pretty small. Its publish to SlideShare.net feature has the simples signup process ever. It’s the same dialog as used to log in, so if you don’t have an account it just asks you for the password a second time (the confirmation step) and creates the account on the fly.

Though many would prefer this not to be case, most slide decks are just bullet points. In an upcoming post I will defend this widely reviled convention, but for the moment let’s just accept reality. This means if you’re going to create slides, editing the text on them should feel comfortable to users of desktop apps. If you’re not a programmer, you may not appreciate how big a challenge that is. Browser apps have to be small, because they load every time you visit the web page. WYSIWIG text handling is very hard to get right under any circumstance, but doing it well in a browser has thus far eluded every major developer I know of. I didn’t blame them.

Another area where web apps understandably lag is Undo. It’s not as nasty to implement as text editing, but it’s not pretty, either. 280Slides

In my view 280Slides is the first browser app to get so close to the supremely elegant handling of text boxes characterized by PowerPoint and Pages that you don’t miss the desktop apps. Creating a good presentation is hard and you don’t want to feel like you’re fighting the software just to jot down a few bullet points. 280Slides make it a dream.

I haven’t been this excited about a web app since Google Docs hit the scene. I can’t wait for 280Slides to finish the few features it hasn’t baked in yet, so I can try creating PDF and PowerPoint presentations. Highly recommended.