Presentations with Opera and S5
I avoid Keynote and PowerPoint to ensure that I will be able to refer to my presentations three years from now. Until last week, I thought that using the HTML-based S5 format meant compromising the style of my presentations.
While preparing a presentation for the Mozilla summit, I found a pretty S5 theme called Glossdeck. More importantly, I learned that Opera supports the Apple Remote for switching between slides.
I'd love to be able to do the same using Firefox rather than Opera. Using Opera is somewhat painful because switching slides using the keyboard is awkward (it uses space and shift+space rather than arrow keys) and Glossdeck has to be modified to work in Opera. But Firefox on Mac doesn't have a full-screen mode or support for the Apple Remote.
Boris Zbarsky's work in bug 113934 for reparenting Firefox tabs between windows should pave the way for Firefox to have full screen on Mac. It would be great if Firefox had Apple Remote support as well, perhaps as a DOM event sent to the focused web page.
If anyone at the Mozilla summit wants an Apple Remote, I brought three extras. I hear they work with Keynote and PowerPoint too.
July 29th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
I was working on a wrapper for Songbird (at least for OS X) but I’ve been a bit too busy to finish it up. I’ll try and push it to a google code project or something soon.
July 29th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
I filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=448454 asking for Apple Remote support.
July 29th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
I did a presentation recently using NeoOffice and it came out alright. I even had one slide that embedded an MPEG screencast segment.
Just before my presentation, I grabbed an Apple Remote and discovered it didn’t work with NeoOffice. A quick google search later and I came up with this bit of software that got me up and running.
http://www.jfedor.org/neoremote/
July 29th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
When I read this the first thing that came to mind was “surely there’s some open-source thing that does slideshows better?”
Turns out there isn’t. Or if there is, it’s good at hiding. Maybe Firefox can fill in that gap after Abiword/Gnumeric for people that don’t like Openoffice’s size…
July 29th, 2008 at 6:59 pm
Based on the AppleRemote code by Martin Kahr, martinkahr.com, I wrote a simple app that converts remote button presses to arrow keys sent to the foreground app. I’ve used it in many presentations with S5, but mainly with Safari rather than Firefox because Safari’s Saft extension has (used to have?) better full-screen support than Firefox.
http://chrisdolan.net/Remote2Arrows.app.zip
http://chrisdolan.net/Remote2Arrows_src.tgz
Martin’s work is MIT license, so mine is too. Only tested on 10.4
July 30th, 2008 at 5:18 am
Space/Shift-Space? What about PgUp/PgDn?
July 30th, 2008 at 10:13 am
I ended up just configuring ired lite to send appropriate keypressed to firefox so I could control S5 like that, though the lack of true full screen is irritating.
July 30th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
“ired lite” looks great. Thanks, Mossop.