Presentations Get Even More Interactive With SlideShare’s New JavaScript API

Romin Irani, January 28th, 2011

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SlideShare, the YouTube of slideshows, is firmly entrenched as the place to go for presentations. Its embedded player is also highly visible across web sites. Compared to Audio and Video, presentations fall somewhere in between and one wondered if there was a way that developers could mix them all up. With the SlideShare Player API, the company has given developers a tool that could bring about some exciting new applications.

Slideshare announced its Javascript API which provides access to major functions, navigating through presentations and controlling the Embed Player via Javascript. Think of simple JavaScript functions to jump to a particular slide, go to first/last slides, move to next and previous slides and so on. The API documentation is basic but sufficient since it deals only with controlling the player. There is also a demo application and sample code that you can start off with.

The blog post also presents a couple of interesting possibilities with the API:

• Automating Slides and Video
• Automating several players to randomly play slides one at the time

The standard SlideShare API, with its REST-based interface, has been in existence for a while. Using it, developers can write applications which can upload presentations, retrieve embed code for presentations and many more functions. But with the new JavaScript Slideshare Player API to control the presentation, it has thrown open the possibility to create mashups that could do much more. Be ready to see presentations move into the next orbit.