hwbeamer - Any Amigans in scientific Research, Presentations, Talks?

Hi all,

I wonder if other people are here who work \ study in areas where they have to give scientific talks or presentations of any kind?

I developed with Hollywood a presentation software, copying the look & feel of Latex's beamer package and enhanced it with the additional full power of Hollywood like result computations, algorithmic implementations and, of course, animations. I called it "hwbeamer ".

I've successfully given just recently my PhD talk.
Have a look at my YouTube video of my slides.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-M9vzg5aNYk

There you also find some more information about hwbeamer, the setup and my presentation.

If there is some interest I would open source hwbeamer (if permitted by Airsoft Softwair) because I don't have the time to make it fail safe. It works fine for me but I know exactly how to use it. There is also almost no documentation available at the moment. So I wonder if there is some interest in such a presentation software and, more important, if there is someone willing to help/further develop such software.

Feel also free to test my compiled slide binaries for AmigaOS, MorphOS, Aros, Windows, Linux and MacOS -- oh, and of course, I also mentioned Amiga in my slides ;)

http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~tcrecel/slides/

cheers,
Tom

Is the speed 1:1 the same on os4 as well as on video, or still a bit slower in some parts ?

EDIT: tested on peg2, aos4 version indeed slower. Expectually those white resized rectagles on the main page when you choice something, just like a slideshow :)

the effects on the alpha channel are a little bit slow (on all platforms) -- depending on the resolution.

I recommend 1024x768 -- more is not necessary for presentations (actually typical projectors do not support for higher resolutions. At least not at my working place ;) ). On my X1000 it is not slower than on my linux laptop :) The code is absolutely not optimised in any way. In the contrary. I actually was in hurry :D

The video was recorded on my X1000 in 800x600. See youtube description.

cheers,
Tom

Cool! How did you do it?

I was aiming for creating a Hollywood presentation for work (coincidentally regarding a course aimed for research students on Information Visualization and Retrieval!). But I ended up doing it in impress.js (a javascript library for Prezi-like presentations), since I didn't have enough time to learn Hollywood.

Do you have fixed layout, or is it possible to dynamically change layout after slides have been written?

Yes, I do use presentation stuff at work (as teacher), this is in conjunction with our "Smartboard". The Software is called "Smart Notebook 10". I thought about creating a similar soft via Hollywood (HW would be very suiteable for such a purpose). However there is no point (for me) to do such a huge project in Hollywood, as we won't connect Amigas to our Smartboards (Even though I did for the fun of it:
Hyperion Support Forum )

Nevertheless, your Software looks good, and someday I might need similar functions, as I plan to establish a "pupil/student company" which will produce all kind of maps for beamers/smartboards/websites etc... it would come in handy, if there would be a suitable software to present those maps on smartboard and beamers...

Slides with text blocks + animations, FX-effects can be easily defined like this:

p_slide(
Function()

Local b0 = {heading="My Block Heading"
,"Some [color=#RED]COLOURFUL[/color] text"
,"some text with a [/p] pause"
}

Local b1={heading="Block with numbering instead of bullets"
,"Line one of this block"
,"Line two of this block"
,"Line three of this block"
,enum=True}

Local fxT={movein={#LEFT,-300},moveout={#RIGHT,-300}}
Local lid = p_block(b0,nil,fxT
,b1,nil,fxT
,#CENTER)

If (lid) Then p_triggerNextPage()

EndFunction
)

This code creates a slide with 2 text blocks that are moved in from left to right. The first block has bullets at each line and for the second block, the lines are enumerated.

I may provide some simple example source sooner or later :)

cheers,
Tom

I'm not sure what a smartboard is, but you also can compile hollywood for windows or linux. I gave my presentation on a linux laptop. The nice thing with hwbeamer is, that you can have a second window (placed on you laptop screen, not on the projector`s screen) that shows "hidden text", e.g. additional infos that reminds you what you wanted to mention additionally to the infos on a slide. And also it shows the time passed since the presentation was started. In this way, you always know if you are in time or if you have to speed up :)

cheers,
Tom

A "smartboard" is an "interactive videobeamer". This means, the computerdisplay will be shown on a projection screen via beamer. In case you installed "Smartboard drivers", the projection screen will interact as "touchscreen". Therefore you can move the mouse with your fingers, just by touching the projection screen. In case you have a special "presentation software" installed (here: SMART Notebook V10) you can also use pens and a spunge in order to write something to your "blackboard".

Said this, every 86x Linux or MS Windows application can be used on a "Smartboard". This includes Hollywood proggies (compiled for one of those...) as well. As I said before, your software could be used for presentation on a smartboard, plus it could be even more advanced in order to replace "SMART Notebook V10" Software. But why reinvent the wheel... Nevertheless, it would be nice to sell digital maps and add a little presentation tool towards it, which is usable on Windows/Linux + Beamer/Smartboard e.g. "Higlighting" mapregions, drawing 10km circles round cities etc... so maybe I'll come back to this in a year or two.

Okay, thanks for the explanation. I guess, connecting a touch screen device (like, tablet, laptop) to a projector does the same then? (Only the the interactive input is moved from projected screen to the source device). I wonder what solution is cheaper. ;)

I do my academic presentations on Hollywood Designer and my old A1, then compile for win and use them on my laptop...