Recently, while preparing for a presentation, I decided to build yet another presentation tool (yak-shaving, I know).
I had been using my S5-based hack so far, but the pain points I came across were
- I tend to to do Takahashi style presentations (big text, big graphics), which S5's layout is not tailored for.
- I found I spend a lot of time memorizing what I am going to say during the presentation.
Demo
The result is Preston. Let's see it in action.
In the demo I have a mock demo of a presentation for Preston itself. Once you "Start Presentation", a second window appears which runs the slides. The original window has the contents of the slides and your notes side-by-side. So, during the presentation, I would choose to have the projector not mirror my laptop screen, put the presentation window on the projector screen, and leave the notes window in my laptop screen, so that I can see it but not the audience.
Writing the Presentation
The format of the presentation file looks like this
Slide 1
(these are the notes) Hello, this is slide 1 where I will
talk about topic one for about 10 seconds.
Slide 2
Now I will talk about slide 2 for a few seconds as well.
Here we have two slides. The first slide will consist of the text "Slide 1" and the second "Slide 2". The indented text below each of them are the notes for that slide, which will be on your second screen and invisible to the audience during the presentation.
Markdown
Both the content for the slides and the notes are run through Markdown, so you can use things like links and images, and a lot more.
More Info
Go to Github and checkout the README for more info if you are thinking about actually using this.