Despite all this community involvement, though, the code base was in a single set of hands: mine.  Anything that was added to the “official” S5 code was done by me, as time and understanding allowed.  As anyone could have predicted, this has slowed the advancement of S5 over time, and of late it’s brought advancement to a near standstill as I’ve struggled to keep up with other demands.  The only thing I’ve added since 1.2a2 is the ability to blank the screen by hitting the “B” key, and that change has yet to become public.

Of course, the code is explicitly in the public domain, so anyone can add to S5—and many have.  ZohoShow, for example, outputs S5 1.1 code.  I’ve seen S5 used for product tours of medical software and board games.  Jonathon Snook added a “live preview” version of the notes view, which I totally want to see in the primary code base.  David Goodger made a bunch of useful Docutils-compatibility additions that I never managed to fold in.  I also know of four different implementations of remote-control functionality, where one person runs a slide show and changes are reflected in remote copies.  This is a feature perfect for distance learning, corporate netconferences, and other situations.

And all this time, there was still no way to have those enhancements, or any others, “come home” to the source of S5 unless I did it myself.  Until now.

Thanks to Ryan King, we now have S5 Project, which will be the official home of S5.  Besides the blog and mailing list S5-discuss, there will be a wiki, a source code repository, and a bug-and-feature-request tracking system.  If you’re an S5 hacker, or even a frequent user, please do join the mailing list (I know, I know—another one?) or at least subscribe to the S5Project RSS feed to keep track of what’s going on.  I expect the mailing list to become the place for coders to talk about additions they want to make and bugs they’re trying to squash, even after the bug-tracking software gets set up, and it will be a primary source of content for the wiki-to-come.

While it’s been the case that anyone may add to S5 in their own way, for whatever purpose they see fit, now there will truly be community access to what’s always been a community project.  I hope you’ll join us there!

• On any slide with incrementals, an indicator of incremental progress will appear in square brackets next to the overall slide show progress on the title line.  It’s a little crude, I admit, but it serves the purpose well enough.
• Clicking on the title of either the Elapsed Time or Remaining Time counters will “minimize” them.  Click a minimized title to maximize the box.  The actual minimum and maximum effects are purely CSS-driven, hooked onto a collapsed class name.  I’m still pondering the best way to handle this feature, so the class name may change, as for that matter may the mechanism by which one can min/max the boxes.  Suggestions are welcome.
• Keypresses and clicks are passed from the note window back to the slide show.  In other words, the slide show fully is fully operable from either the slide show window or the notes window.  The only difference is that the notes window doesn’t have the navigation links and popup navigation menu (said difference to disappear in a future release).

That’s it.  In the process, though, I uncovered a bug that shows up in Safari 1.3.1 and 2.0, where it’s ignoring the show-first feature for incrementals.  I’m going to assume that the problem lies in the getIncrementals() function, though of course I could be wrong.  If anyone can spot the error and provide a fix, I’d be grateful.

Update 2 Mar 06: in addition to the Safari problem, I’ve discovered that IE/Win doesn’t seem to share event information between windows.  Thus, if you try to run the slide show from the notes window, errors get thrown.  I managed to fix this in clicker() by adding a test for notes-window events, but trap() has a very different structure and I’m not sure how to fix it.  Thus the testbed in IE/Win currently lets you advance the slide show from the notes window by clicking the mouse button, but keyboard navigation throws an error.  If anyone can tell me how to get around this, even with a pointer to a good article on passing events from one window to another, I’d be very grateful.

To use the notes feature, here’s what I do.  Upon loading the base slideshow into Opera, I position the window on my secondary monitor, which is here taking the role of an LCD projector.  Then I hit “n”, causing the notes window to appear on my laptop’s monitor (in the role of the presenter’s machine).  After bringing the slide show window back to the fore, I select “Full Screen” in the “View” menu, and the presentation maximizes itself to the secondary monitor.  As I navigate through the slide show, the notes window stays perfectly synched with the presentation.

There may be better ways to get the notes window on the primary monitor and the presentation on the secondary monitor, but that one worked for me.

I did notice some odd bugs here and there in Opera 8.02, a copy of which I also have hanging around, but nothing that was a show-stopper.  The one that sticks out in my mind was that multi-slide jumping wasn’t cleared out after the jump.  For example, from the first slide I’d type “3 (right arrow)” to skip to slide four.  Hitting the right arrow again jumped me to slide 7, which is wrong.  Opera 8.5 acted as intended, so I’m going to assume that it has something to do with how the JavaScript is written.

If there are problems in Opera 8.5 or Opera 9 that my testing didn’t uncover, let me know.  I’ll fix anything I can—and if there’s anything I can’t, I’ll turn it over to the Opera community to figure out.  Members of that community have already been invaluable in figuring out how to work around bugs in Opera’s CSS handling in order to make the controls available, so I’m confident they’ll be able to handle anything I can’t figure  out.

New to S5 1.2:

• The progress indicator (e.g., 6/10) is now a permalink to the currently-displayed slide.  This will require an update to any S5 1.1-era themes, but it’s a minimal thing.  Granted, the current alpha doesn’t have updated styles to handle the presence of a link.  I’ll get to it.

• Bug fixes intended to make it more Konqueror-friendly.  I do not know if Konqueror will run S5 1.2.  I do not have access to Konqueror.  The fixes I included were sent to me by helpful S5 users, and may or may not have resolved all problems.  If there are still bugs in S5 when displayed in Konqueror, you are invited to submit bug fixes in the comments, or via the contact address I mentioned before.  Bug reports should be done in the comments, where other Konqueror users can see them, and not via the contact address.

• Vastly improved integration with Opera.  As chronicled in “Opera and S5 1.1“, S5 was originally intended to be a cross-browser emulation of OperaShow.  As time went on and features were added, the two diverged.  Thanks to efforts by Hallvord Steen, Opera should now be shut out of a lot less of S5 than it was.  In fact, it may well be feature-complete as compared to S5 1.1, and will get most of S5 1.2′s features.  With one possible exception…

• A “notes” window capability.  The notes view is largely the work of Shaun Inman, who wrote me last week to say, “Hey, I did this.  Interested?”  Was I ever!  I’d been meaning to do it ever since I saw the notes view in Keynote, but Shaun got there first, clever wolf that he is.

  

  To see this in action, in either the OSF or XOXO versions, hit “n”, or call up the controls and click on the three-line icon on the left.  A new “notes” window will open, looking very much like the “notes” view in Keynote.  This window displays whatever notes the author has created for the current and next slides; these are done by placing content in an element with a class of notes, pretty much exactly like the handout feature from earlier versions of S5.  The notes window also includes timers showing the time elapsed since the presentation was opened and the time elapsed since the current slide was loaded.  There’s also a pauseable countdown timer for those who prefer to keep track of time that way.  (I added the countdown timer.  Yay me!)

  The general idea is that you load up your presentation, open the notes window, and put the presentation up on the projector while keep the notes window on your presentation machine.  (Which is of course only possible if you turn off video mirroring.)  As you move through the slide show, you can see notes to yourself and keep track of time so you don’t run over.  Keen.  I don’t know how much I personally will use the notes, but I’m all over the timers like they were a stack of pancakes and I were Mrs. Butterworth.

  At the moment, the JavaScript that opens the notes window is minimal, so the notes window is fairly chromeless and not resizeable in IE/Win.  It’s also a bit rough in terms of some of its layout, as befits the alpha status.  I’m also considering adding a keyboard command for “fullscreen”, which would maximize all open S5 windows to fill the screen they’re currently occupying, and possibly also strip away the browser chrome.  I did a few experiments along those lines, but wasn’t satisfied with the results, so it didn’t get into this release.

  On a related note, I’m not sure that notes can be made to use with Opera so long as S5 relies on OperaShow, because OperaShow by its very nature makes all browser windows fullscreen.  If there’s a way to get OperaShow to put one window on one monitor, and a second on a second monitor, then that would be the answer.  If not, I’m not sure what to do short of abandoning OperaShow usage entirely, which seems strange and wrong.  But we’ll see.  If nothing else, we can verify that everything in S5 besides the notes feature works in Opera, and push those changes into an S5 1.1.1 release.

One known problem is that when Firefox displays an S5 show using the text/xml or text/xhtml+xml MIME types, which is necessary for slide shows that incorporate things like MathML and SVG, things break because innerHTML ceases to be supported.  I have a proposed fix submitted by an S5 user, but did not get it into 1.2a1.  I plan to correct this before reaching the first beta release.

A number of people have asked for a merging of effects libraries like Script.aculo.us and FACE, and there have even been scattered implementations of same.  It’s definitely tempting.  I’m not at all confident that this will happen for 1.2, though, mostly because I don’t understand enough programming to make the connections.  I’m also not sure how many of these I could pile into the code before the whole thing came crashing down.  I have hopes that we’ll be able to work out a “best practices” way to add such capabilities to any S5 presentation file, and let each author add them or not as they see fit.

So there you go.  Have at it!

A little history: the first version of S5 was meant to recreate what OperaShow did, except do it in other browsers.  That was pretty much it—but as I was fiddling with the JavaScript to make that work, I realized I could build my own navigation menu in the JavaScript.  So I did.  Then, when I tested to see if it worked in Opera, it didn’t.  I tried for a while, but couldn’t make it work.  So I decided to hide the menu from Opera.  Better no feature than a broken feature, and besides, it was the only one so hidden.

When I tossed S5 out to the public, I figured maybe twelve other people in the world would be interested.  It was one of those, “Hey, this is something I hacked together, look how geeky I am!”

And the crowd, against all expectations, went wild.

So the list of things I thought would be interesting to add some day suddenly took on extra weight.  There were people out there who actually wanted to use S5, and wanted things like font scaling and incremental display of slide content.  Furthermore, there were people contributing code to improve the system.  Out of nowhere, a little open source project erupted in the comments of my posts.

In order to keep things from bogging down, I defined a feature list for S5 1.0 and shipped it out.  All along, I made sure that the slide show would fall back to OperaShow in Opera.  To do so, I had to write a routine (called notOperaFix() because it had to fix things for browsers that aren’t Opera) that swapped around the media values for various linked style sheets, among other things.  I also had to define the S5 format so it was compatible with the OperaShow Format specification.  That meant changing some things from my original file format, and in my opinion not always for the better.

Despite a few people telling me to just drop OperaShow and OSF support because it wasn’t worth the effort, I kept those mechanisms in place as we moved to version 1.1.  I figured that since Opera had a slide show system, I’d let people use it.  Besides, any time I created a test copy of S5 that didn’t let Opera drop back to OperaShow, it completely failed to display the slide show.

Now S5 1.1 is out, and it has more features that people asked for—font scaling based on window size changes, incremental display, more keyboard commands, and so on.  Throughout it all, I made sure OperaShow would still work.  And it does.  It doesn’t get the keyboard commands, or the font scaling, or the incremental display.  I did try.  I couldn’t figure it out.

Now, there are those who apparently think that this means I’m a liar when I say S5 is cross-browser.  I admit it—S5 doesn’t work in Mosaic 1.0.  It also quite likely fails in IE5.0/Win.  Actually, I think it fails in IE5/Mac, which is ironic since my starting point for S5 was a rudimentary slide show system written by Tantek Çelik.  But it does not fail in Opera, because it’s quite intentionally designed to be OperaShow compatible.  It isn’t feature-identical, but then, the features in (and version number of) Opera for the Mac usually lag behind Opera for Windows.

Lying about S5′s cross-browser nature?  Giving Opera the cold shoulder?  Utterly wrong on both counts.  I’ve done everything I can to make sure Opera is still at this particular table.  Giving Opera the cold shoulder would have been me saying, “Screw it, I’m not providing a fallback to OperaShow and if Opera users don’t like it, they can install Firefox”.  And I’ll be totally honest: I’m sort of tempted.  I could clean up the markup; cut out some JavaScript gymnastics, including a backflip over a Gecko bug when dynamically changing media types, which I wouldn’t have to do if I weren’t still supporting OperaShow compatibility; and simplify my life.

After all, it’s not like I sprang this on the world.  The last eight beta and release candidate versions of S5 were published here.  Comments and contributions were solicited and welcomed, and many were received.  The state of Opera support has not changed one iota in all that time.  There were several months in which anyone could have stepped up to the plate and contributed fixes for Opera.  Did anyone?  No.

I’d do it myself, except I’m not sure I can.  For example, I just a few hours ago made a copy of the S5 package, unpacked it, and edited the JS file so it did no Opera detection: the scripts all ran on Opera the same as they do for any other browser.  I loaded it into both Opera 7.5 and 8.02 for OS X, which is what I have right now.  You know what happened?  Nothing.  The slide show didn’t happen.  The outline view came up, changed slightly, and then sat there.  And do you know why?  Because Opera defaults to identifying itself as Internet Explorer.

So I fixed that in the preferences, and tried again.  Everything worked just fine except for two things.  One, the browser window had a vertical scroll bar for no apparent reason.  Two, the controls were nowhere to be found, either by hovering over where they’re supposed to be or using the “C” key to toggle them.  I’m not sure why these two things are happening, because the JavaScript console reports nothing amiss.  That has me kind of stuck.

So here’s the deal.  Want S5 to be feature-equivalent in Opera?  Fine.  Take the S5 1.1 package and fix it for Opera—preferably version 6 or later, but I’ll take what I can get.  Liberally comment your code so I know what you did, and why, or else post fixes here.  I promise that, if this is done in such a way as to not degrade behavior in any other browser—because, remember, they don’t have anything like OperaShow on which they can fall back—and so that the code is maintainable, I’ll roll the changes into my version of S5, and release it as 1.1.1 or 1.1o or something.  (The same is true for any other browser, in fact.)

I’ll help out where I can, if anyone has questions about this bit of JS or that bit of CSS in the S5 directory.  Post them here and I’ll do my best to answer.  If I get hit with a bolt of genius and can suddenly fix the problems myself, I’ll do so, but odds are that won’t happen.  It will therefore be up to the community to help out.  This isn’t just me, as the credits page makes clear; S5 has long been a community effort.

Put another, more succinct way: don’t complain, contribute.  It’s more satisfying in the long run, and it’s more constructive.

Here’s the biggest change: S5 is now explicitly in the Public Domain.  In the end, this best reflected what I wanted for the technology, and a poll of contributors-to-date indicated no objections to this change.  Version 1.0 will stay as it was, under a Creative Commons license, but version 1.1 and later will all be freely available to anyone to do with as they please without fear of licensing restriction.

As part of the 1.1 package, I’ve included the introductory slide show, the default and I18N themes, all relevant documentation, and XOXO versions of the introductory slide show and the structural references.  A future version of S5 will probably be better harmonized, so I don’t have to have two versions of the references.  I’d have done that for v1.1, except it’s already long past time to ship. 

As always, share and enjoy!

Also new to this revision are some slight modifications to the CSS that drives the system’s presentation.  The changes were all in the vein of changing div.slide to .slide.  Why bother?  Because with these slightly more generic rules, it’s now possible to create your slide show using a XOXO format instead of the OSF-compatible div-based markup.  (And the XOXO version may be OSF-compatible; the only real difference is that you’re using a list instead of a series of divs, but I’m not sure how much OSF cares that each slide be in a div instead of some other element with the appropriate class.)

I’ve included a XOXOized version of the testbed slideshow in the rc2 package, so feel free to check it out, if you’re interested.  Long-delayed thanks to Tantek for helping me work out the few changes that needed to be made to the CSS, and providing me with an example XOXOized S5 file so I could use it as a reference.

The folks at Barebones are aware of the problem and have indicated that a fix will be in the next maintenance release of BBEdit.  For now, if you want to edit S5 files in BBEdit, stick to 8.2.

(And if anyone wants to take a crack at helping out with the problems in S5 1.1rc1, see my earlier post on the subject.  Thanks!)

As a partial salve, I’ve made a few changes to the S5 information pages.  The main page now has links to the latest official version and latest revision, as well as quick links to useful information.  I updated the FAQ a bit as well, to clarify the licensing situation.  At some point, I hope to create a separate page that contains a feature list, but that’s on a back burner right now.

What I really want to do is finally make S5 1.1 a full, final reality.  Therefore, I’m pushing it to version 1.1rc1 with the knowledge that there’s a new bug to be addressed.  In Safari 1.3 (and I assume 2.0 as well, though I haven’t had a chance to install Tiger yet to find out) the arrow keys double-advance, or even more.  So if you hit the “right” or “down” arrow keys, you’ll jump forward two slides; “up” or “left” moves you back two slides.  On incremental slides, you’ll advance to the end of the slide, or the next incremental element.  The space bar doesn’t evince the same problem.

I assume this is a keystroke handling problem, but I’m not entirely sure—the behavior of incremental slides makes me wonder if maybe it’s something else.  Either way, if we can get that fixed and don’t uncover any other major problems, I’d be happy to call this bad boy done.  Help, as always, is welcomed and appreciated.

Update: Pritt left a comment on another post providing a solution for the Safari bug.  Look for 1.1rc2 shortly!

NOTACON 2

Conference dates: 8-10 April 2005.  Both my talks will be the morning of Saturday, 9 April.

• The Construction of S5; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the DOM — a look at where S5 started, why it grew, how its growth was accomplished, what kinds of design decisions had to be made, and where it’s headed in the future.
• Humanely Wielding a Clue By Four: Reflections on Managing a Massive Mailing List — a look back at three-plus years of managing css-discuss, this will be an unvarnished peek into the life of a list administrator who actually cares about the list.

Northeast Ohio Chapter of the Usability Professionals’ Association (NEOUPA)

Metting date: Tuesday, 24 May 2005.

• Rapid UI Prototyping and Easy A/B Usability Testing with CSS — an updated version of the short talk Molly Holzschlag and I gave last year at User Interface 9, this will look at ways to use CSS and standards-oriented design to quickly develop UI designs and to do comparison testing of different designs.

Neither event is free, but then, neither event is terribly expensive, either.  So come on down!  They should be a peck o’ fun.

I’m also speaking at the NASA Glenn Research Center this afternoon, but that’s an internal gathering, not a public event, which is why I didn’t mention it before.  I haven’t been there since the late 1980s, so it’ll be interesting to see if anything’s really different.

The more recent of the two is WP-Gatekeeper, which is almost ready to go from RC1 to RC2 except for one tiny little problem: I upgraded my local copy of MySQL, and it blew away my WordPress database.  So I mysqldumped the database from meyerweb.com, copied it down to my hard drive, and tried to mysqlimport it.  And tried, and tried, and tried, until eventually my eyes started bleeding.  No dice.  Therefore, no possible chance of my testing the update script, which is necessary because it actually deletes tables from the 1.0b1 version of Gatekeeper.  I don’t want to put it out into the wild without making sure that it deletes the right tables, and no others.

Obviously, without a successful import of the dump file, I can’t test the script.  I’ve read the MySQL documentation, and done everything it says to do.  It fails.  I tried logical variants, in case there was something the documentation was leaving out.  No dice.  Then I tried illogical variants, including some SQL statements that included words I wouldn’t ordinarily type, let alone say out loud.  The error message is basically always the same, and it never helps.  It goes something like this:

~/mw > mysqlimport -u root meyerweb meyerweb20050309.sql.dump 
mysqlimport: Error: Table 'meyerweb.meyerweb20050309' doesn't exist,
 when using table: meyerweb20050309

Well, no kidding, geniuses; there is no table called that, because it’s the name of the dump file, not anything in the database.  And yes, when I dumped the DB from meyerweb, I did it so that it contained the CREATE and USE directives at the top of the dump file.  They don’t seem to make any difference at all.

Plus all that was after I reinstalled MySQL about seventeen times because it refused to start up even though the installation was supposed to be point-and-click.  Eventually I switched to a different, third-party install package, and it went like a charm.  Serves me right, I suppose, for assuming that the MySQL.com folks could put together an install package that actually works.  At this point, as far as I’m concerned, MySQL is the rotted corpses of the maggots that once infested the corn inside a pile of moose droppings.

Not that I’m bitter that this wasted four hours of my life or anything.

The other project is, of course, S5.  It’s currently stuck at 1.1b5, because there’s this problem in Firefox for Windows that I simply cannot figure out.  I commented on it a little over a month ago; the basic problem is that when viewing the testbed slide show in Firefox for Windows, it seems to “jiggle”, apparently from constant re-scaling of the fonts.  I can’t figure out how to stop it.

So any ideas, anyone?  At this stage, that’s pretty much the last major problem before going final.  Safari still blocks use of Page Up and Page Down when in the outline view, but that’s something I can live with.  The nervous-twitch display in Firefox for Windows isn’t acceptable in a non-beta version.

I’ll still be using S5 1.1b5 for my SXSW presentations, but that’s okay because I’ll be using Firefox for Macintosh, which doesn’t appear to suffer from the same problem.  If it does start having problems, I’ll just switch to Safari.  No big deal.

Anyway, that’s where things stand on those two projects.  Hopefully I’ll get over the roadblocks soon, and be able to get them moving again.

There is still a major conflict between S5 and the AdBlock extension for Firefox/Mozilla.  I don’t know what’s causing it, but I do know that if you’re running AdBlock and you load up an S5 presentation, you’re likely to find yourself trapped in the presentation, unable to use the back button or do much of anything else short of quit the program.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.  I’ve started a thread in the AdBlock forum about it, and hopefully a solution will be found.  I will not delay finalizing 1.1 for this, however.  If a solution comes up after that and it calls for modifications to S5, then I’ll release a 1.1.1 version for AdBlock users.

A similar problem in Safari is still hanging about: in the outline view, the Page Up and Page Down keys are ignored.  I still have no idea why.  If anyone can find a solution, please let me know.

The PNG transparency fix introduced in 1.1b4 is still restricted to foreground images (i.e., those brought in via an img element).  In the default directory, there are two .htc files.  v1.1b5 uses pngbehavior.htc.  The other file, iepngfix.htc, can theoretically confer alpha-channel recognition to background PNGs in IE/Win.  I was unable to make this work, but the pieces are all there to experiment and find the fix I missed.  The behaviors need to be attached using addRule calls in slides.js; there’s one there already.  Hopefully a fix can be found in time to make it into 1.1 final.

Speaking of which, this is the last beta version before going final—I need to get it out the door so I can concentrate on other things for a bit.  Bug reports beyond the AdBlock problem are welcome, and fixes even more so.  I’m still open to feature requests for versions beyond v1.1, of course.

• “Meta” keys—function keys, command, control, alt, and option—should no longer be trapped by keys().  Thus, for those of you who discovered that you couldn’t use command-W to close the window in Firefox/OS X, that should be fixed; hitting F11 to invoke full-screen mode should also work; and so on, and so on.

• While I was at it, I restructured keys() so that the only keystroke S5 pays attention to when in the outline view is “T”, to let you toggle back to the slide show view.  Anything else gets passed up by S5.  Despite this, Safari is still ignoring Page Up and Page Down while in the outline view.  I can’t for the life of me figure out why.

• At the suggestion of Romain Herault, I’ve modified clicker(e) so that it will ignore clicks inside of embed and object elements.  This will allow you to interact with an embedded object, like a Flash file or a video, without advancing the slide show.

  I’m aware that some people have run into problems adding videos to their presentations, but I’m not at this point able to take on the task of analyzing the problems and figuring out potential solutions.  If someone else wants to work on fixes, there’s every chance I’ll be able to get fixes into the next version of S5, but very likely not this one.  I have a similar stance regarding the long pause of unstyled content while the presentation loads.  If someone devises a fix, I’ll study it for inclusion in the next version.  I personally don’t have a problem with the pause, but I realize there are those who’d like to eliminate it, and if it can be done without causing problems I’ll certainly add it.  Just likely not in this version.

• PNG alpha channels are now honored in IE/Win, if only for img elements and not backgrounds.  You can see this happening on slide 5 of the testbed.  Woohoo!  This happens thanks to Erik Arvidsson’s pngbehavior.htc, a copy of which now resides in the default directory.  It may one day be replaced with IE7, but we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.

  The one sort-of drawback to using this approach is that it seems to require that the call to pngbehavior.htc sits in an embedded style sheet, or else nothing happens.  This may very well have to do with the way the JavaScript monkeys around with external style sheets during startup.  If any of you IE/Win JS gurus can figure out a way to get the behavior to fire without having to embed it into the presentation, that would be stellar.  If not, it’ll just be documented as a “leave this in if you’re using alpha PNGs; otherwise you can take it out” thing.

One thing I’m still thinking about changing is the handling of the Home and End keys.  Right now, they move you forward or backward by one slide, just like the arrow keys and several others.  I’m thinking of making them jump to the first or last slide instead.  I’m hesitant because making the change means it would be much easier for a presenter to accidentally jump to the beginning or end of a slideshow with a single keystroke, and you can already easily jump to any slide by typing the slide number and hitting Return.  On the other hand, it’s a functionality that makes general sense, and it makes it much easier for a presenter to intentionally jump to the beginning or end of a slideshow with a single keystroke.  What are your opinions?

At this point, I would anticipate that 1.1 will have one more beta version to eliminate any bugs that are discovered as well as adopt any optimizations, and then it’ll go final.  I know there have been other feature requests (and may be more on this post, which is fine) but it’s really late in the beta cycle to add anything else.  Any new features will have a chance to get into the next version.

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.

There’s really only one notable change from the previous version.  I incorporated Jordan Liggitt’s “type slide number” code into this version.  Why his, when others have done similar things?  Because his version was well-marked with comments, and thus easy for me to figure out what he’d done and how he’d done it.  So here’s how it works:

• If the user types a number (multi-digit is allowed), the script stores the number.  Inputting any non-number key clears the entered number.
• If the user hits Enter/Return while there is a number stored, the slide show jumps to that slide.  Any attempt to jump directly to a slide past the end of the slide show results in no action, although the number is still cleared.
• Hitting any of the “Next” or “Previous” keys while there is a number entered causes the slide show to skip the number entered in the appropriate direction.  Thus, entering “3″ and hitting the space bar would jump forward three slides; entering 5 and hitting Page Up would jump backward five slides.  Skipping past the end of the slide show will drop you on the title slide, which is something I’m thinking about changing, though I’m not entirely certain in what way.

I’m mulling over which keys should invoke which jumping behavior.  For example, a couple of times I’ve typed a slide number and then hit the space bar to advance directly to that slide.  Instead, I jumped forward by that number, which is correct but obviously not what I was subconsciously expecting.  So I’m thinking about further restricting the keys that trigger the “jump n slides” behavior.  Anyone have suggestions based on other slide show software?

At this stage, I’m likely to put off adding the multiple-author meta that I toyed with in earlier versions.  The general need is still there, but I’m just not able to think the problem through with the kind of clarity I want.  It will have to wait for another day.  I’m also dithering a bit about the licensing, though at this point I’m leaning pretty heavily toward using Expat.  My hesitation is largely based on my very desire to make the right choice so that I never, ever have to worry about it again, you know?

Anyway, as always, feedback is welcome.