Live Maps inside a presentation using Bunkr

If you have an ArcGIS Organizational account, you already have license to use Esri Maps for Office. It works really well and enhances your presentation from the boring screenshots of maps we have all grown numb to. 

BUT! What if you don't have Microsoft Office? (there are a few of us) Or you use a MacBook or ChromeBook or UbuntuBook(?). Never fear, You can still embed your maps into a presentation using the Newly improved Bunkr App. 

Bunkr has been around for a few years. However, they very recently Re-built themselves from the ground up. The streamlined tools and formatting will not appeal to those who are heavy powerpoint wingding/clipart/rainbow-font graphic users. It's a very minimalistic design. Which I respect, because presentations should focus on what the presenter is saying and slides should reinforce what is being spoken. Infact, I uploaded on of our graphic-heavy canned presentations and Bunkr essentially imported them as jpegs. 

Instead, Bunkr focuses on web-data; stuff already on the web. Yes, it's cloud-based. No, you cannot download a presentation. No, there is not animation. Deal with it. You can however pull in Google Drive, Dropbox files, Instagram feeds, Pintrest boards, YouTube Videos, Grooveshark Playlists, Time/BBC/TechCrunch/Wikipedia Articles, images from anywhere, Code from Codepen ... and on... and on. Seriously, the current list is about 75 different online services and the application is still in beta. (You can open and read PDFs!)

Get to the Maps man!

At first I was excited to see the ability to embed code. That way I knew at least I could share a CodePen and display the results. I've played with that service before. Using it to keep, test and maintain good iFrames of embedded maps from our ArcGIS Online.  In the example Bunkr presentation below, the first map is this CodePen. It works ~fine~ and the display isn't 'horrible'. Still, it is using another service to 'host' your iFrame, so there is some funkiness there, not everything displays exactly like you want. 

Then I Learned that to display the Google Drive document, Bunkr requests the iFrame code directly. So, I tried the next logical step and inserted the whole code snippet from my shared ArcGIS Online map. BOOM! Complete slippy map in a presentation format. Here is the presentation to truly understand what I mean. 

The only downside is that the code snippet is gone. You can't make those slight edits or adjustments on frame size. Once it's pasted and the slide is created, there's no editing. You just create a new slide and re-paste. So, I'll probably keep a list of embeddable iFrame code snippets somewhere, like I do now. 

Awful presentations are usually the cause of fatigue and skipping out early on work. Engage your Audience with interactive maps.

You might be saying: "Seems like a lot of work to just display a ArcGIS Online map. Why not just link it to Your Powerpoint?" Well that's a valid point. However, if you want a smooth presentation and the ability to easily pull in MANY different sources from around the web, sometimes switching back & forth from Chrome to Powerpoint to Crome again gets tiring for the viewer. You've seen (or YOU have presented) those kind of maps, the presentation is constantly switching from browser to Powerpoint. And if the screen resolution is extended and they have to draa-aag the browser onto the correct screen, then eventually the presenter gives up and doesn't go back to presenter mode and just stays on the editing view.... ugh. you know what I mean? disconnected and confusing presentations are poor presentations. 

That's really what makes presentations awful: Presenters don't often enough think about the audience.