Slidery allows you to create full screen slide presentations quickly and easily. Entire presentations are written as essays, using simple markup characters to indicate which elements are displayed in the presentation. This encourages presenters to think about slide content naturally, as opposed to focusing on the mechanics of laying out page displays. With Slidery, you create each full presentation within a single text file, and that text file can be used for both printed handouts and as the slide presentation source.
In printed handouts, viewers are able to see which bullet phrases were selected, within the context of the full presentation content. This allows the audience to more easily understand what each bullet means. Often in presentations, bullet points are so cryptic that handouts don't serve any useful purpose... or they force the listener to furiously scribble notes, instead of understanding and processing the information being presented.
Slidery provides a simple solution to those common problems, for both audience and presenter.
Slidery can include images and even entire executable programs in a presentation. This allows you to create features which are difficult to complete in other presentation systems. The potential capabilities of this option are limited only by your needs and creative abilities. You could, for example, include bar charts which display live data collected from a web survey. Or you could include formulas with computations performed live, using slider controls or other widgets. You could include spreadsheet calculations performed from files read live during a presentation, etc. The code used to build powerful little apps is simple to learn.
Slidery runs instantly, without installation, on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android, as well as on many legacy platforms. The entire system is about 1/2 meg (small enough even to email every OS version as a tiny attachment), so you can be sure your presentation will run anywhere there is a computer.
HOW THE PROGRAM WORKS:
By default, the folder C:\slidery\ is created as a working directory, so if you already happen to have a folder by that name, you may want to move contents elsewhere.
The first dialogue displayed by the program asks for some basic layout settings:
The font size settings are used to set the header, bullet, and subtext sizes. This allows some generalized control of the presentation layout sizing (i.e., how much info can appear on screen, how items fit on different screen resolutions, etc.).
The header and bullet color options allow you to customize the colors in your presentation. Click the "Colors..." button to select colors using a popup color selector.
The "bullet" option allows you to choose the character(s) displayed at the beginning of each bullet point line. Bullets can be as many characters as desired (default is a single asterisk followed by a single space).
The uppercase option allows the system to automatically capitalize the first letter of each bullet point. The default is 'true'. Set it to false to leave all bullet points upper/lower case, as-is in the source text.
The max lines option allows you to set a maximum number of bullet points on each slide. Topics (headers) which contain more than the max number of bullet lines will automatically bleed over onto new slides. This ensures that bullet points won't disappear below the bottom of the presenter's screen display area. Automatic bleeding saves the author from having to manually break up source texts with numerous headers to layout page content. Together with the font size options, the max lines option allows presenters to quickly fit the content to any given screen size, at the moment of presentation.
With the file option, you can select an existing presentation file, or create a new file name. If you create a new file, a sample template with 2 generic slides, a slide with 2 image examples, and a slide with live running code, is generated. Whether the file is newly created or loaded from a previous session, you can edit and save the layout, or simply quit the editor to view the presentation.
The basic presentation syntax is simple:
SLIDE HEADER text is PRECEDED WITH "===",
Headers END WITH A NEWLINE (carriage return).
BULLETS are ENCLOSED IN SQUARE BRACKETS [].
SUB-BULLETS are also enclosed in square backets,
AND EACH SUB-BULLET ITEM IS MARKED WITH "*" (asterisk).
A bullet's extended text follows the closing bracket.
In the presentation, you can click on the bullet to
display the extended text.
[#image %file] or [#image http://url.com/file.jpg]
inserts an image (jpg png gif bmp). You can load from
a web site, as in http://url.com/file.jpg, or from a
file on a flash drive, hard drive, etc. on your computer
using the format %localfile.jpg.
[#code file.r] includes a Rebol VID (GUI) code file.
This allows you to include executable code in a live
presentation. You can run fully functional apps
directly *on* a slide. Just save the Rebol code in
the specified file, and be sure to use unique variables
that aren't duplicated elsewhere in the slide layout.
NOTE: DO NOT INCLUDE DOUBLE QUOTES (") IN HEADERS OR BULLET POINTS. USE SINGLE QUOTES (') INSTEAD.
Below is an example layout. It contains 4 slides. The first 2 slides contain 3 bullet points, each with some extended text that can be read by clicking on the bullet points in the presentation. The third slide contains 2 bullet points with extended text, and 2 images, one loaded from a web URL and the other from a local file logo.png). The last slide contains one bullet and a layout with some executable code (a small app that is contained in the file app.r):
===Slide Header 1
[Item 1] in slide 1 has this text content...
[Item 2] in slide 1 has this text content...
[Item 3] in slide 1 has this text content...
[Item 4]
[*sub-bullet #1 *sub-bullet #2]
===Slide Header 2
[Item 1] in slide 2 has this text content...
[Item 2] in slide 2 has this text content...
[Item 3] in slide 2 has this text content...
[Item 4]
[*sub-bullet #1 *sub-bullet #2]
===Slide Header 3
[Image #1] is loaded live from a URL.
[#image http://rebol.com/view/bay.jpg]
[Image #2] is loaded from a local file.
[#image logo.png]
===Slide Header 4
[Running code] is loaded from a file.
[#code app.r]
During the presentation, you can use these controls to view slide content:
right arrow key, space bar, or left mouse button
advances to the next slide
left arrow key or right mouse button
moves back 1 slide
mouse click any bullet point
to view the bullet's extended text content
[Esc] key to exit this view
[F1] starts ANNOTATION MODE
In this mode, a screen shot of the current
slide is opened, on which you can draw
annotations with the mouse. [F2] saves the
current screenshot and annotations to a .png
image file of your choice. [F3] erases all
current annotations. [ESC] closes draw
mode and returns to the presentation.
[Esc] key to end the presentation
Be sure to load the business-programming.txt presentation example in the C:\slidery\ folder, to see a longer example of text presented using Slidery. That text was taken directly from the text introduction at http://business-programming.com . It should give you a good idea of how simple it is to create long text presentation from a single prose file, with lots of bullet points that bleed onto numerous slides
