Ryan's Journal

While attempting to solve the deceptively simple sounding problem of "come up with a slide show presentation," I ended up designing a slide show presenter for browsers. The story below.

I don't own a working copy of Microsoft PowerPoint (this troubles me not), so I attempted to resort to OpenOffice.org's suite. Their presentation software is quite strong, able to import PowerPoint files and powerful enough to do some of the same things. But it's missing the ability to play a background song all the way through and the ability to automatically start playing a video when a slide progresses.

I am assuming there are macros out there for OpenOffice.org that could accomplish both tasks, maybe, but I didn't have time to find them or write them myself.

So, like any good web geek, I went back to the beloved land of the browser and tried to come up with a solution there. IE has a full screen mode, but its little task bar and status bar pop up on every page change or object load. Opera also has a full screen mode, but it doesn't support starting a video from a certain point other than the beginning. Mozilla hated my video format. So IE it was. I had to write up a presentation package that avoided switching pages and loading things at random to make it a viewable presentation.

I did slide transitions in Javascript and made use of the iframe tag to allow one sound file to run through the entire presentation. However, I couldn't load video and then run it on cue, so I had to make do with some crappy Javascript hackery and count on the video files loading in approximately the amount of time I allotted for every run through the presentation. It was a bunch of Microsoft-web-only stuff. I feel dirty.

But given a chance to come back and fix some of it for the wider web in general, I think I will.

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