Revolution to author and present multimedia content?

[Bill Vlahos]

I think this would be a great idea as described.

Bill Vlahos
Jet Propulsion Laboratory

On Sunday, August 11, 2002, at 10:33  PM, Michael J. Lew wrote:

> I believe that a project to make a PowerPoint replacement could be 
> surprisingly manageable. First, PowerPoint is mostly bloat and flashy, 
> but useless features. Many users regularly choose to use outside 
> applications for things that PowerPoint could do (e.g. outlining and 
> drawing) so there is no need to replicate those 'features'. Secondly, 
> many of the features that would be needed are already built into 
> Revolution. For example, the geometry manager is useful switching from 
> edit mode to full-screen mode and the backdrop property can instantly 
> deal with any mis-match between stack and screen proportions. Groups 
> are a natural way to deal with the variety of slide templates. Slide 
> transitions are built in. Image importing needs only a convenient way 
> to get images from the clipboard. Animations are readily constructed 
> using the animations manager. Basically, the similarity of the card and 
> slide metaphors is such that using Revolution to make slideshows is a 
> natural.
>
> Importantly, in order to be useful to those like me who already code in 
> Revolution, the project needs only to supply some templates and 
> standard slide components and behaviours; the rest can be scripted 
> directly in Revolution. Thus such a project can be useful even at a 
> minimal stage of development. Extra capabilities can always be added by 
> anyone who has Revolution because the project would be naturally 
> modular.
>
> In my imagination we will end up with a standalone application that 
> makes and displays slideshows just like PowerPoint, and a version that 
> runs within Revolution that will make open-ended multimedia 
> presentations convenient for Revolutions scriptors.