Ryan Collins

🕹ī¸ Do Something Great! 😄

Tag: presentations

  • Markdown to presentation

    Since my preferred interface is the command line, yesterday I was thinking how cool it would be to knock out a presentation from Markdown. I could work on the content, and not get distracted by the interface. Luckily, I didn’t have to look any further than Pandoc. Pandoc can take a multitude of formats and convert to other formats. For example, to create a presentation from a Markdown file, a simple pandoc -t revealjs -s presentation.markdown -o presentation.html.

    Before the presentation is viewable, you need to download the reveal.js framework. Unzip it and rename the folder to reveal.js and put it in the same place as the html file created by Pandoc. You can then open the html file up in your browser and present away! The easiest way to publish the presentation publicly would probably be in Dropbox. Share the link to the html publicly and you should be good to go (your mileage may vary, I haven’t tested this yet).

    The format of the Markdown folder is pretty simple:

    % My Great Presentation
% By Ryan Collins

# Slide 1

This is the content for slide one.

. . .

Three dots with spaces between them will pause the presentation.

## Slide 1a

A header 2 will navigate *down* from the previous slide.

# Slide 2

Another header 1 will navigate *right*

# Slide 3

> - List item 1
> - List item 2

    Pandoc will create a title slide from the % lines above automatically. You can also include graphics with the standard Markdown ![My great graphic](link/to/graphic.png). I’m going to play around with it more, and I also hope to find time to check out the other html5 presentation formats that pandoc works with, including DZSlides, Slidy, Slideous, and S5.

  • Personal computers are extinct, bring on mobile technologies – #OHECC11

    Here’s my presentation from the OHECC 2011 conference and the handout
    is available by clicking here    :

  • Put a countdown timer on a presentation slide

    [][]

    This past week as I was working on a presentation, I had a slide where I
    asked the participants to discuss among themselves. I wanted to set a
    time limit, but I didn’t want to have to switch out of Keynote, I wanted
    it on the slide. It took me a couple of minutes, but I finally came up
    with a quite clever solution, if I do say so myself. 🙂

    The first thing I needed was a little countdown video that would count
    down from 10. I started a new Keynote project, and created a ten second
    countdown. Originally I used ten slides, with the transition taking a
    second, so that when played it would count down in ten seconds. The
    problem came when I wanted to export the movie. The minimum amount of
    time I could show a slide was two seconds, and since I didn’t want to
    count down by two a new solution had to be made. So I deleted all the
    slides in my presentation save one, and put 11 text boxes on it (10-0).
    I then did a pop build in and out, and set the time for the build to be
    one second. The out build would happen concurrently with the in build of
    the next number, so I got a pretty cool effect as a bonus. I exported
    this out as a Quicktime movie    .

    Now in my presentation, I added a question text box with a build in
    transition to occur after a click. Next, I added my movie with a build
    in transition to appear. The secret is to set the movie to appear
    however many seconds you want to wait. I set it at 60 seconds, so
    participants actually had 70 seconds until it finished. It doesn’t
    appear until the 60 second mark has passed, and then counts down to 0.

    Works better than I had hoped! You can download the movie
    here    . (right click and use Save
    as…)

    []: https://ryancollins.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/countdown.png

  • A Kindle, iPad, and iPod Touch walk into a classroom – #neotech2011

    Here are the slides with notes: Handout from my presentation. For
    those following along with Twitter here are the results of the poll:
    [][]

    I really enjoyed the conference, and want to thank everyone that was
    involved at putting it on. It was very well run (although I didn’t win
    the MacBook Air door prize… :-).

    (more…)