The Buckblog

I finally sat down and worked out 18 slides that define the meat of my upcoming presentation at RubyConf. I like how they turned out, but I need some more time to think about them and see if they still say what I need them to say.

I originally planned to use OpenOffice Impress to do the presentation slides, but ran across a little utility called MagicPoint. Though certainly not as powerful as something like Impress or PowerPoint, it is definately more attractive to a geek like me.

Why?

Because you create your slides in plain text, that’s why!

Consider the following slide definition, taken from one of the slides in my upcoming presentation:

  %page
  %center, area 100 100 0 0, size 6, font "standard", prefix 0

  %lcutin, fore "#00F" 
  How can DI/IoC help me?
  %size 4

  %pause, rcutin, fore "#F00", size 5
  "CREDT" 
  %size 4

  %pause, lcutin, fore "red", font "standard-bold" 
  C
  %cont, fore "black", font "standard" 
  onfigurable

  %pause, rcutin, fore "red", font "standard-bold" 
  R
  %cont, fore "black", font "standard" 
  eusable

  %pause, lcutin, fore "red", font "standard-bold" 
  E
  %cont, fore "black", font "standard" 
  xtensible

  %pause, rcutin, fore "red", font "standard-bold" 
  D
  %cont, fore "black", font "standard" 
  ebuggable

  %pause, lcutin, fore "red", font "standard-bold" 
  T
  %cont, fore "black", font "standard" 
  estable

Isn’t that beaufiful? Obfuscated, full of strange characters and bizarre words… brings tears to my eyes. In spite of the apparent unreadability, though, the script is easy to learn and fast to write. I wrote my entire 18-slide presentation this way in just a few hours, total.

(In truth, I picked one of the more complicated of my slides—but even the fairly straightforward ones look pretty cryptic to the uninitiated.)

I really like how MagicPoint exports to HTML, though—it converts each slide to an image. This means that each slide looks exactly how you intended it, not however HTML can best render it. Nice.

At any rate, I’ll be giving a preview of the presentation to the BYU Ruby Users Group on Saturday the 25th (a week from today)—we’ll see how polished I can get it by then. I’m sure presenting it once will point out various deficiencies in it as well.