Real Flashers Don't Powerpoint
As I'm currently preparing my workshop for the shockwards event I'm heavily involved in building my own presentation app with Flash. Of course the intention is to build a modular system that can be reused and extended over the time. It will probably not be full featured until friday, but I've already got a template system, tasteful transisitons and a smooth navigation.
With Flash 5 it was perhaps a bit difficult to build a reusable presentation engine, but now with Flash MX I think that no flashcoder of honour should ever touch Powerpoint again.
Powerpoint is a great polarisator - there are people who hate it and there are people who love it. There is a very nice read by Nicholas Allen: Death By PowerPoint that I've just enjoyed. And "Click to add title" is a Ping-Pong style game for Powerpoint Challengers...
Okay, back to work.
Posted at November 06, 2002 12:46 AM | Further reading
I've been meaning to do the same.. but had little time. I'd love to see it once done!
Chafic
I've been working on a similar project, only after a while it turned more into a video compositing/editing program than powerpoint.
Cant wait to check out yours!
How do you plan on saving data? XML on the server?
Saving is a challenge indeed. For the moment I do manual XML with notepad. But for the future I see 3 options: A: local Object (probably not portable enough), B: Copy/Paste XML-Textfile, C: Server-Side Solution. But as I want to do a standalone projector C is probably out of question. On the other hand - the editor could be webbased and then return XML files that can be placed into the application folder.
Why would a serverside solution be out of the question with a stand alone projector? As long as you got an internetconnection, you can load the XML file from a server, or with some Flash Remoting, use it as a webservice.
Yes absolutely - I just want to make sure that it can also work without an internet connection.
Recently completed a dynamic 'presenter' tool in MX Pro for the company I work for. XML driven, it has three main functions - building presentations from available stills/runtimes, preparing intro screens, and delivery. Uses the LSO to save user data and prefs.
Comes with built in help too!
Anyone interested in seeing it, mail me. miss@missweblash.com
