Presentation with S5

Influenced by Holger and Simon, I decided to use S5 for my presentation at the Desktop Summit in Gran Canaria few weeks ago. It's purely based on web technologies, it works in modern web browsers. More information is available at the official website, including demos, even with different styles and effects. Thanks to the use of web technologies, you can even create the slides online.


For the fun of it, instead of just using a web browser (so boring!), I wrote a simple QtWebKit-based tool to run the slide shows, dubbed s5runner. The code is checked in already to the Graphics Dojo repository. Beside just launching the slide shows in a QWebView, the 200-lines C++ code adds a few more goodies (although arguably, all these extra stuff can be implemented in pure HTML/CSS/JavaScript instead). Run the program and open the included slides.html (in the example sub-directory), or just enjoy the following 2-minute screencast:

A countdown timer (currently hard-coded to 30 minutes) is installed at the bottom right corner. The screen can be blanked temporarily to black or white, useful when you want to steal the focus of the audience from the slides. Going full-screen (and back again) is also easy, this is important if you'd like to show some live demos during the talk. The slides look ugly due to the aging or faulty projector? Use the night-mode, something you have seen in the previous OpenStreetMap example.

When doing a talk about programming, it is often unavoidable to show code snippet. Thanks to Chili, the jQuery code highlighter plugin (there are other alternatives to pick:
prettify, syntaxhighlighter, and many others), you will get the highlighting feature with zero effort. It's quite useful as the code fragment (which you likely show only for a few seconds) becomes more understandable. My favorite is however the live-editing feature, just press F3 to start editing the slide while you are showing it at the same time.

If you like this presentation tool, feel free to extend it. For example, you can have more presentation effects, like pulsating or shaking, by using script.aculo.us-based Presentacular. This example tool only supports basic editing, but I have shown a WYSIWYG HTML Editor before, so you can augment its editing features to support e.g. inserting images from the disk, changing character and paragraph styles, and so on. And of course, support for PDF export (with one slide per page) will be just very nice. A PowerPoint-killer, anyone?


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