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Saturday, January 5, 2008

Embed Google Presentations

Google rolled out an update to Google Presentations that lets you embed a presentation into your own website. Just switch to the Publish tab and hit the publish button – you will now find some inline frame code Google calls the “Mini Presentation Module” to copy & paste. Similar features have also been around on other sites that allow sharing of e.g. PowerPoint files, like Scribd.

I just created a sample application to embed below (note that I dragged & dropped the image in the final slide from another browser window to include it... quite easy):

You can see how parts of the embed gadget look like YouTube’s video gadget, like when you click on Menu. (Consistency is good, though Google should watch to not start repeat some of YouTube’s low-usability quirks.) A first test indicates that changes to your source presentation will be immediately reflected in the mini presentation module, provided the page it’s embedded on is reloaded.

Now, you were already previously able to embed presentations using your own custom inline frame pointing to the published presentations, though this is a more optimized, streamlined approach. Unfortunately, even with this new gadget you are not able to adjust the width and height of the presentation. Also, Google forgot to provide any kind of accessibility fallback for non-inline frame supporting contexts (a simple link to the presentation inside the <iframe> tags would have been a start) – it’s doubtful whether any of their tools would hold up with the authoring tool accessibility guidelines put forth by the World Wide Web Consortium.

Google also rolled out a couple of other changes to Google Docs, they announced, including the ability to create sub-folders. The top bar above every Google Docs folder went through a little design change as well; though still a little bulky, it takes up less space than before.

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