S5 1.2a1

Published 18 years, 10 months past

It’s back: S5 1.2 alpha 1 is now available (177 KB Zip archive), and you can play with either the OSF or XOXO versions of the latest development version if you just want to preview it online.  In addition, I’ve set up a contact address specifically for S5 questions and feedback.  You can find a link to this new address on the main S5 page.

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!

Comments (26)

  1. innerHTML should work in Firefox 1.5, also when used in a document served with an XML Media Type. Furthermore, text/xml is soon to be deprecated because of some character encoding issues (see RFC3023) and text/xhtml+xml is not a registered media type. I assume you mean application/xhtml+xml?

    What exactly are the issues with Opera?

  2. Incremental display is cool. thanks, Eric and Hallvord!

    About the notes: you can easily set a child window to the restored state in Opera, even in Fullscreen mode. There is a keyboard shortcut for this by default (‘5’). And if you disable in Opera’s prefs ‘Open pages in tabs’, sized javascript popups will automatically open as a ‘detached’ child window, outside the application window. IIRC, this is even default behavior on MacOpera 8.5, even with ‘Open pages in tabs’ enabled. It is also possible to use drag and drop in the windows panel (Ctrl+0 to open and hide) to drag the notes tab out of the main window to detach it. Or with Ctrl+Alt+N you can create a proper second application window to drag the notes tab into. Just tried this, the script keeps the state of the notes connected to the fullscreened presentation.

    I have no clue how to prevent a child window or second app window to appear on the projector, but then I’m not experienced with giving presentations. I also don’t know how to keep the notes window on top while clicking on the presentation to advance the slides, so this causes some extra hassle (Ctrl+Tabbing or Alt+Tabbing).

  3. Is it just me, or are the XOXO and OSF links identical? By which I mean pointing to the same location…

  4. Anne: I guess I should have said “…ceases to be supported, I’ve been told” as I was taking the word of a few users. If that isn’t the problem, any idea what might be causing the failures reported by other S5 users?

    There shouldn’t be any Opera issues aside from the notes-window thing. Fortunately, Rijk gave some good advice that I can document later on.

    Jemaleddin: um, oops. Fixed the links. Thanks!

  5. Eric,

    I think we can combine it with FACE in a way that makes it incredibly easy to add it to (for instance) a 1.2 release, because it might be possible with only 2-3 extra IF statements in the S5 code and absolutely nothing more than that.

    And like I said, we’re creating that first prototype ourselves as it is, so no worries about not understanding enough programming. A plug-and-play (ish) solution would also be nice, though, maybe we can look into that while we’re doing this anyway.

  6. Eric,

    I posted a comment in one of your older posts about a bug in your S5 demo. The bug still seems to be there.

    The bug is as follows.
    Screen Resolution: 1280×1024
    Maximize the browser window. Doesn’t matter if it’s Firefox or IE… the bug appears in both. Open the slide show, and go to slide #8 (S5 Themes). This slide is supposed to show 4 images, I think in two rows of 2. However, with the browser maximized, the images appear in a single column, with only 3 of the images in view (IE shows a little bit of the 4th image at the bottom of the slide area, and you can see that it’s shifted to the left of the other slides… the 4th slide is not visible at all in Firefox).

    In Firefox, if you have stretch your browser to the size it would be if it was maximized (though not actually maximizing the window), you will also see this happen. Resizing the browser even slightly will cause the images to re-align properly.

    Hope that helps. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help you debug that.

    Great tool by the way (as well as the Color Blender… superb really). :)

  7. In Firefox 1.0, iirc you /can/ use innerHTML in XHTML documents like this:

    oElm = document.createElement(‘div’);
    oElm.innerHTML = ‘something something’;
    oElm2 = document.getElementById(‘xxx’);
    oElm2.appendChild(oElm);

    The gist of it being, if you used innerHTML on a dynamically created element, it works.

    ~Grauw

  8. What do XOXO and OSF mean exactly? Could you add an acronym tag to these please?

  9. Pingback ::

    Davide Bocci in Un Passo al Giorno » S5 1.2 alpha 1 is now available

    […] 9th, 2006

    Disponibile la nuova versione, in alpha, del sistema di presentazioni on-line basato su XHTML, CSS e Mi […]

  10. It still has 2 bugs i wrote to you at Dec 15, using mail adress “yourname@thisdomain” but it probably got stuck into some spame sieve…

    First one seems general, after using controls with mouse you cannot
    use keyboard right after that. Nothing happens at first press, ok
    after that. The reason seems to be that you set number=0 in the end of
    go(). But you never check it against 0, instead you should set it to
    undef or 1, i think…

    The other one is Safari specific, after using select box, focus is set
    to reload button, like pressing Tab, so next Tab order after form is
    some button on the Safari bar. Keyboard as you guess does not work
    until you set focus back to window by clicking somewhere. I don’t know yet how
    to prevent this or how to set focus back without clicking (which
    effectively advances slideshow), but I’m working on it.

  11. Trackback ::

    steve.ganz.blog

    S5 Update from Eric Meyer

    Eric Meyer has just released S5 1.2a1. For those that are unfamiliar with it, S5 stands for “A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System”. Now with features like a permalink progress meter and compatibility fixes for both Opera and Konqueror, perhaps…

  12. If you want access to Konquerer (and more), you can run Suse 10 with KDE in a VMware Player virtual machine.

    http://www.vmware.com/products/player/
    http://developer.kde.org/~binner/vmware/

  13. Faruk: I look forward to seeing what you come up with, but if FACE (or other) effects don’t make it into 1.2, there’s always 1.3 or some other future version.

    Peter: that’s not a bug in S5 so much as just an artifact of how I wrote the CSS for the theme, and it honestly doesn’t bother me. I don’t think of the 2×2 grid as being important.

    Laurens: the reported problems might have been post 1.0, or heck, they may not exist. Anyone have an S5 deck containing SVG or MathML that does run into trouble, so the problems can be analyzed?

    Thomas: done.

    Priit: I fixed the first bug in my local copy; thanks! I either don’t understand the second bug you report, or else I don’t suffer from it in my copy of Safari; either way I don’t have a fix for it.

    Robert: I may or may not be able to get that to work, since I’d have to run KDE on Suse 10 in a VMPlayer running on a Win2K VirtualPC image running on my Mac. Still, if I get the time, I’ll take a crack at it. (Although—2.5GB image!? Crikey! My poor HD!)

  14. Eric,
    I have SuSE 10, and yesterday updated to KDE 3.5. I am sorry to report that S5 does not run properly in Konqueror. The XHTML display is one long continuous page, although you can go through the presentation using the space bar control, it does not give you the individual slide look. It’s more like a long roll of paper towels where the sheets have not been torn off, and the eye candy is missing (no styling).

    I have used the earlier examples in Windows successfully, and it does work in Firefox on Linux, but Konqueror… sorry.

    ~Regards,
    Mark

  15. Ouch. Now I’ve gone and done it: posting before checking in more depth. And this is definitely strange.

    The first trip to the slide show, nothing works, as I mentioned above. BUT. Do a Back arrow, then Forward again and the show begins to work. In the older version, slides will change with the mouse click. In your newest version, mouse click don’t work in the page, but they do on the >> and

  16. The second one seems to be Tiger only, because Panther in my office Mac behaves correctly as I can confirm now…

    But, if somebody can confirm this bug on Safari@Tiger: use selectbox to navigate and press for example spacebar right after. What happens?

  17. An easier way to access Konq just send yourself some free Ubuntu CDs, each CD is infact two, with one being normal Install and one Live (shove it in and it boots up into Linux) thingys.

  18. Oh that link died for some reason, https://shipit.ubuntu.com/

  19. Woring preview of S5 Version 1.2a1
    OSF Version: http://www.s5easy.com/9/
    OXOX Version: http://www.s5easy.com/22/

  20. I haven’t tried it, but one of the OS X ports of Qemu might work better than a virtual machine in a virtual machine.

    http://www.kberg.ch/q/
    http://cordney.com/QemuX/

  21. I thought that this link is sort of an other example that was inspired by this effort.

    http://www.robertnyman.com/2005/11/13/proudly-presenting-ajax-s/

  22. Firstly,

    window.document.getElementById(“[elementId]”).isDOM = 1;

    then,

    window.document.getElementById(“[elementId]”).innerHTML = textContent;

    Found it on a german website. Good thing javascript is in english. But hey, FF is only trying to be DOM complaint.

  23. Trackback ::

    Davide Bocci in Un Passo al Giorno

    S5 1.2 alpha 1 is now available

    Disponibile la nuova versione, in alpha, del sistema di presentazioni on-line basato su XHTML, CSS e Microformati. Una realizzazione Eric Meyer.

    …

  24. Trackback ::

    Davide Bocci in Un Passo al Giorno

    S5 1.2 alpha 1 is now available

    Disponibile la nuova versione, in alpha, del sistema di presentazioni on-line basato su XHTML, CSS e Microformati. Una realizzazione Eric Meyer.

    …

  25. Trackback ::

    Davide Bocci in Un Passo al Giorno

    S5 1.2 alpha 1 is now available

    Disponibile la nuova versione, in alpha, del sistema di presentazioni on-line basato su XHTML, CSS e Microformati. Una realizzazione Eric Meyer.

    …

  26. Hi!

    I’m running Konqueror 3.5.5 on Kubuntu Linux and neither v1.1 nor v1.2a2 run fine with that. For 1.1 to work, you have to enable “JavaScript Debugging” and “Report JavaScript errors” (Konqueror bug?), or you will only see a white page.
    With v1.2a2, you see a long, scrollable page, with the two options from above disabled. If you enable them, you really get errors (at line 601 and 749):
    “TypeError: Attempted to access ‘text’ property on undefined object (result of expression jl.options[jl.selectedIndex].text)”
    Hope someone can fix this!

    bye
    tgp.

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