Rev & replace PowerPoint from Rev List

[Michael J. Lew]

Dear All

I spent a while fiddling around with making a replacement for 
PowerPoint and I'm sure it can be done and it would be awesome! 
However, I ran out of time and have not made much real progress (I 
could dig out a card that makes a good start at a bullet-point slide 
master). There was not much interest from the list at the time, 
although Alejandro certainly was interested, he made some good 
suggestions and has useful bezier curve and eps import/export stacks 
that would be great components.

I'm not working on the project at the moment (I'm a senior lecturer 
in pharmacology, not really a programmer). When Apple released 
Keynote I decided to wait and see if it would be more to my taste as 
a slide program, and in short it is, well, sort of... Lecture 
theatres at my university are all equipped similarly with G4 Macs 
running OS 9.2 and equivalent PCs running an up-to-date version of 
Windows (I never touch the PCs ;-). Keynote only runs under OS X and 
so I can't use Keynote to display my lectures unless I scrounge an OS 
X PowerBook or iBook. Not on really. However, I've worked out a way 
around the problem, and it even gives me more power than Keynote 
alone.

My new lectures are mostly put together in Keynote with many slides 
imported (flawlessly now that I've updated to Keynote 1.1) from 
previous PowerPoint files. I then export the slideshows as Quicktime 
movies and put them into a player object on a card in a Revolution 
stack. All of my Revolution lecture embellishments like animations 
and simulations are on other cards in the stack. This seems to be a 
good compromise between having the features of keynote and the power 
of Revolution. The only real limitation is that I can't put any 
controls on top of a quicktime movie and so I can't do full 
integration of the slides with other elements. However, that can 
mostly be got around by using the import snapshot command and hiding 
the player.

My final presentation consists of a Rev standalone with a Quicktime 
movie in a data folder. The overall file sizes can be biggish (2.5 MB 
for the Rev standalone and so far up to 4MB for the movie) but I just 
put them onto a Zip disk or burn a CD in case I can't access my 
computer across the net.

Overall, I am happy with this solution to my dislike of PowerPoint 
and I don't think I will be re-opening my project to build a 
replacement myself.

Best regards,

Michael

>Hello Michael,
>
>While researching for my new Rev shareware app I came across your 
>post to the List.
>
>I have been working for a while on an app which deals with Apple's 
>iPhoto, displaying
>photos, saving photo lists, & creating slide shows.  One of my apps 
>places text on or near
>images/photos and I am pondering incorporating some of its features 
>into my new
>slide show feature.
>
>   This is a shareware project (that is how I get food on my table) 
>but with that said, I was
>wondering if you had taken your idea any further?
>
>Any ideas, suggestions, or details of further attempts to "replace PowerPoint"
>would be appreciated.
>
>Kind regards,
>
>sims
>
>
>>I'm thrilled to hear that someone would like to replace PowerPoint
>>with a Revolution-based application!
>>
>>I have been lecturing using PowerPoint in combination with Revolution
>>and Hypercard for many years, with Revolution and Hypercard-based
>>animations and simulations to spice up the material and make some
>>concepts more accessible. Several of my computer-aided learning
>>modules (CALs) that are in use in courses here have been made with
>>Revolution and it is helpful to the students to see snippets of those
>>modules used in a lecture prior to the students exploring the CALs
>>themselves.
>>
>>After some frustrations resulting from upgrading PowerPoint to the
>>most current version, I have very recently decided that it would be
>>worthwhile making a Revolution application to replace PowerPoint for
>>my own use (my preliminary stack is called 'Get to the point!). If
>>Joao, and maybe others, is thinking along the same lines then maybe
>>we could make it into a collaborative project. I have so made a
>>useable (but not bug-free) automated 'dot-point' field template. and
>>have fiddled with making cards grow to fill the screen with text
>>being scaled appropriately. No real difficulties in those.
>>
>>I have mentioned my aspirations to some colleagues at my university
>>and their response is generally unencouraging. They feel that
>>PowerPoint is a huge application that has been developed my large
>>numbers of programmers for many years: true enough, but in that
>>context it is interesting to contemplate the quality of their product
>>;->
>>
>>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.
>>
>>Anyone keen to help?
>
>--
>-----------------------------------------------------------
>    http://EZPZapps.com         info at EZPZapps.com
>       Software - Internet Development - Consulting


-- 
Michael J. Lew

Senior Lecturer
Department of Pharmacology
The University of Melbourne
Parkville 3010
Victoria
Australia

Phone +613 8344 8304

**
New email address: michaell at unimelb.edu.au
**