S5 Update

Published 19 years, 10 months past

I know it’s been a while since the last beta version of S5 was released, but between doing client work, flying to and from Albany (speaking of that, big ups to Dan “So Fine” Feinberg, Ed “The Shark” Skawinski, Ric “Darin” DiDonato, and the rest of the ITU Crew), diversions into PHP hacking, judging a markover contest, starting ballroom dancing classes, and spending time with my family, time has been a wee bit tight.  Things will only get worse once March rolls into town, so I’m going to try to push 1.1 into final status before February is done.

In the meantime, I wanted to point to some cool things that I’ve heard about with regards to S5.

  • S5 was adapted to create an online tour of Epocrates, a popular medical reference package for handhelds.  Kat uses it, as a matter of fact.
  • Ludovic Dubost, developer of XWiki, created an XWiki-based S5 creator, which you can read more about in his blog entry about it.
  • Pelle Braendgaard launched soapbx.com, a Web-driven S5 editor.  You can pick a theme, write the content in a wiki-like form, and get a slideshow.  It was apparently developed using Ruby On Rails.
  • Not quite ten hours after getting Pelle’s e-mail, a message from Lucas Carlson arrived regarding the creation of his own S5 creator: s5presents.com.  It too was developed using Ruby On Rails.
  • Earlier today, Eric Eggert reported that S5 got coverage in the German version of Internet World magazine.  I’m sort of hoping to see a scan of the article at some point.  (Is it copyright infringement if I possess a scanned copy but can’t understand what it says?  Just wondering.)  Update: I’ve seen a copy of the article, so there’s no more need for scans.

In other, less specific news, I know that people have created or are working on creating translators of one kind or another.  A popular request seems to be an OPML-to-S5 translator of some kind, and there’s always the Keynote-to-S5 idea.  So I’m going to throw open comments for people to post links to S5-related projects, translators, and what have you.  Heck, if you’ve recently done a presentation using S5, let’s see it, especially if you created a new theme.  Just please leave this post’s comment clear of bug reports or feature requests.  As of this writing, you can drop those on the S5 1.1b3 post, or else wait for the forthcoming post on 1.1b4.  I hope that’ll go up in the next couple of days, but no promises.

Comments (13)

  1. Pingback ::

    schestowitz.com » S5: Presentation Tool

    […] sentations for a modern Web browser to interpret. The author, Eric Meyer, has incorporated yet another improvement. At midday today I will present my work using S […]

  2. I’ve got the start of an S5 export plug-in for OmniOutliner 3 I just posted yesterday here.

    One problem I’ve not quite figured out is how to handle the handoutcontent, which I’m drawing from the outline note text, but which results in invalid XHTML code because the handout divs are mingled in some cases within the ul and li elements. Nevertheless, I’d like to keep the content associated with the proper level. Any suggestions would be welcome.

  3. [fanboy]
    Eric, S5 is a great tool and an excellent example of a simple foundation for others to build on; thanks for keeping us informed of the growing community around this neeat little chunk of code. It’s also damned useful in itself.
    [/fanboy]

    Have you considered putting S5 onto one of the free software project management sites (Savannah, Gna, et al) so that you don’t have to manually handle all the bug requests, discussion forums, revision control et cetera? I’d hate to see S5 stall as a victim of its own success because it because too much of a drain on your time.

  4. I gave my first s5 presentation a few days ago and it went really well – s5 worked a treat! Top of my wishlist at the moment is integration with Salling Clicker – I’m tempted to learn AppleScript and fixing that myself.

  5. One of the main differences between SoapBX and S5 Presents is that S5 Presents is open-source so that you can download it and install it wherever you want. Take a look at http://s5presents.com/s5presents-1.0.tgz

  6. Thank you for a great tool! Since I began a French translation of S5, a friend of mine at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) decided to push its use for the University’s Philosophy Department presentations. This will probably happen in the summer semester, beginning sometime in February/March.

    Indipendently, another collaborator at the same University discovered your tool, so your immortality in the memories of Swiss academic circles seems assured! ;o)

    Keep up the good work!

  7. I used S5 for my recent MacWorld presentation. I am waiting for 1.1 final to play with a Markdown derivative that would translate readable text to S5 and back again. Thanks for your work Eric

  8. I did my first S5 presentation a while ago, and it went pretty well (both the creation and the presentation part). What I really needed badly, however, was a stop watch to help me keeping my time. Obviously this is important for every presentation, and not a easy thing to do except for the real professionals. So why not implement this into S5? I have almost no knowledge about JavaScript, but I’d take a wilde guess it’s not to hard to implement.

    I imagine an (optional) stop watch located somewhere in the footer area (unobtrusive of course) that starts counting automatically when the presentation starts, which is, when page 0 is left for the first time. Perhaps the display can even visually alert the user when the pre-defined presentation time is up, by turning to red for example.

    I may not be the first to ask for this. Anyone wants to take the challenge?

  9. I’ve seen several “feature request” comments recently. Things like the timer, a splash screen, deplaying movies/animated gifs until the slide displays, etc. It seems like these (while desired, I’m sure) were not the original intent of S5.

    When you move beyond simple presentation (dynamic scaling, header/footer layout) and navigation (page/subpage divisions, keyboard navigation, mouse navigation), and start adding timers, splash screens, etc, you’re no longer really lightweight, which is the whole point of S5.

    Maybe if there were a way to have base functionality, with a simple to add “plugins” that would implement these things for those who wanted it… hmmm…

  10. To quote from this very post:

    Just please leave this post’s comment clear of bug reports or feature requests. As of this writing, you can drop those on the S5 1.1b3 post, or else wait for the forthcoming post on 1.1b4.

    Thanks.

  11. Trackback ::

    Anonymous

    S5: Presentation Tool
    A presentation tool for your browser

  12. I created a module for Oddmuse that lets you view a specially formatted wiki page as an S5 presentation. Take a look – here

  13. FYI the folks over at Enfold Systems have created a S5 product for Plone : http://www.enfoldsystems.com/Products/Open/PloneS5

    Shane

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