What software do HNers use to make good diagrams? We have one suggestion for TikZ so far, which looks nice, but I don't really want to get out the TeX hammer for every little diagram.
Another thing I experimented with for the first time is doing all the slides in html / css / js. The jQuery-Presentation plugin [1] works as advertised, and with css there was considerably less hairpulling when it came time to start tweaking layouts and positions. The content for each slide is written in markdown. You can see all the source for the presentation here [2].
My slide decks are always in PowerPoint because I usually need to make some complex technical animations that are impossible to do in Latex. So then I just use PowerPoint's shapes, etc. to do it.
(I can't wait for some web-based presentation software so I can finally ditch Powerpoint, but right now, with the extremely limited palette of animation ability on all of them, I'm forced to stick with PowerPoint.)
For papers, posters, and other static media, I use Inkscape, which I love. And every once in a while, for a system architecture diagram that I need to crank out really fast, I'll use Dia, which is much less flexible, but ideal for that task.
I always used whatever real animation tool (Anim8or, Blender, python+svg+ffmpeg) I was most comfortable with and rendered the animation to a non-looping GIF. Embeddable almost anywhere.
If you find yourself out of other options, and Inkscape is crashing on you or you don't like the UI, you can try OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice Draw. It seems to work pretty well for flowcharts, though it doesn't come with very many symbols.
I used LibreOffice Impress over Ubuntu for that presentation.
I try to use the best tool for the job though.
Two weeks ago I had to make a code-based introductory presentation and I used showoff instead ( https://github.com/schacon/showoff ) since it comes with syntax highlighting and the slides are just a text file. It took me maybe a couple hours to learn the ins and outs, but then it was easy.
I've heard that the Mac app is good, too, but I haven't used it yet.
http://www.iobound.net/iocopy-talk/
Another thing I experimented with for the first time is doing all the slides in html / css / js. The jQuery-Presentation plugin [1] works as advertised, and with css there was considerably less hairpulling when it came time to start tweaking layouts and positions. The content for each slide is written in markdown. You can see all the source for the presentation here [2].
[1] https://github.com/davist11/jQuery-Presentation
[2] https://github.com/acg/iocopy/tree/master/talk