At last week's GTUG campout, a 3-day long HTML5 hackathon, I signed up to be a TA for the weekend. That meant I spent most of my time wandering around answering random questions and helping developers debug their hacks. But, I can't be surrounded by a bunch of people hacking on cool shit and not join in myself -- it's just way too tempting. So, on Friday night, after coming home from the pitches and discovering that drinking 2 Dr. Pepper's was not in fact a good way to avoid jet lag, I stayed up into the wee hours hacking on an idea I'd been brewing for a few weeks.
As some of you know from my posts about Prezi and Ignite, I am a fan of alternative slide formats and presentation techniques. In my work as both a student and a developer advocate, I have made a massive number of Powerpoint presentations, and I do believe there is much room for improvement and room for experimentation. So, whenever I spot a new slide format in the wild, I get excited to try it out myself.
Early last year, the HTML5 advocates started using a set of slides that both showed off HTML5 features and were written in HTML5 - so they could do interactive samples and harness the power of HTML5 at the same time. (And by HTML5, I mostly mean rounded corners and CSS transitions :). They recently created a generic stripped-down version for anyone to modify and use in the HTML5 studio, but I wanted to take it a step further than that. I wanted to be able to store my slide data in a database and pull that into the slides template dynamically, so that I could work on my slide content separate from my presentation and easily create multiple slidesets without coding the base HTML each time. Thus began my hack!
Since I had limited time to work on the app, I looked around for a sample application to start off with. One of the things I love about App Engine (well, atleast the Python version) is that when I find an open-sourced app similar to the one in my head, I can get it downloaded and deployed in just a few minutes. In the google-app-engine-samples project, I discovered the tasks app by the great Bret Taylor. The tasks app lets users sign in and create different task lists, where every list has a re-orderable set of tasks. The similarity to my app design was uncanny, and ridiculously convenient. With some simple search and replace, the tasks app became a slides app, letting users create different slide sets, where every slide set has a re-orderable set of slides. (See what I mean?) Then I added the more slide-oriented features: I turned the generic HTML5 slide deck into a django template that pulled in the data, I added a "theme" option for each slide deck and used a different CSS for each theme ("party", "ballerina", and "android"), and I created a notion of a slide type for each slide (either the intro, transition, or body).
I demoed the app in this form on demo night, and as usual, I haven't had time to add anything else to it since then. I'd like to add an "import from docs" as the next feature, as I have a few slidesets I want to bring over. I also think the slide editing interface could use some love and re-thinking, as it's really just a re-skinned task list editing interface right now. I have open-sourced all of the code here, as I'd love for other people to play around with it and maybe submit some patches (hint hint).
Happy 5lide-ing! :)
1 comment:
Thats actually pretty cool 8)
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