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what a tease (X and OOo)

I was told Friday that my laptop, with recent-ish (Fedora 7) X could finally do sexy things like ‘plug in an external monitor and have it do more than clone the laptop’s monitor.’ The first thing that popped to mind when I heard that was ‘ooh, I could do slides on the VGA out while putting slide notes on the laptop monitor.’ If you’re trying to do low-word count slides, this is a really useful feature, since you always have the right set of comments at hand and on screen just in case you get lost/forget something without drowning your audience in the words. So that was exciting. (Those who saw the GUADEC keynote last year will know that I’m trying hard to do my talks in this style.)

Of course… it turns out OOo doesn’t actually support this yet. What a tease to find that out after 15-20 minutes of mucking with X (which would have been 2 minutes if I hadn’t typo’d xorg.conf.) Blah.

[Ed. later: as Jimmac points out in comments, the latest version of S5 supports this quite well. HFSNW. Now if only theming S5 slides was something mere mortals could do.] 

Comments closed — Trackback URI RSS 2.0 feed for these comments This entry (permalink) was posted on Tuesday, July 10, 2007, at 4:48 pm by Luis. Filed in design, software.

10 Comments

  1. daniels

    Which chipset are you using? Having to edit xorg.conf is unmitigated loss.

    Posted on 10-Jul-07 at 5:17 pm | Permalink
  2. Luis

    915GM. Had to add a ‘Virtual 2048 768′ to Display to make it work.

    Posted on 10-Jul-07 at 5:52 pm | Permalink
  3. Jakub Steiner

    Its quite crazy, that a presentation software written in javascript does the dualhead with notes very well :)

    http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/

    Posted on 10-Jul-07 at 6:02 pm | Permalink
  4. Luis

    Jimmac: it does? I was looking through the S5 docs for any indication that would work, but saw nothing… if so, that would be awesome.

    Posted on 10-Jul-07 at 6:04 pm | Permalink
  5. David Mills

    Just a small question: what does HFSNW stand for? google didn”t help here.

    TIA

    David

    Posted on 10-Jul-07 at 11:19 pm | Permalink
  6. Geoffroy Carrier

    Luis: it’s coming in version 1.2
    You can already use it with prereleases.
    At the bottom right part of the bar, you have a “Show note” icon.
    It opens a new window, with timelines, your notes on the current slide and on the next slide!

    Posted on 10-Jul-07 at 11:34 pm | Permalink
  7. Luis

    holy f***ing s*** no way.

    Posted on 10-Jul-07 at 11:43 pm | Permalink
  8. Geoffroy Carrier

    I d*dn’t und*rst*nd!

    Posted on 11-Jul-07 at 12:02 am | Permalink
  9. David Mills

    Thanks, I’ll sleep so much the wiser :)

    Posted on 11-Jul-07 at 8:20 am | Permalink
  10. Dan Winship

    I had an idea about this a long time ago:

    The presentation program could display the notes overlaid on top of the slides, but nearly transparent. Then you turn the contrast all the way up on the laptop screen, and slightly down on the projector, such that you can read the notes on the screen, but the audience doesn’t see them, even though in theory both screens are displaying the same image…

    Posted on 11-Jul-07 at 4:33 pm | Permalink

3 Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. Open Source Fedora on 30-Nov-99 at 12:00 am

    links from TechnoratiJul 11, 2007 Tom Tromey: Another FE Test  - Jul 11, 2007 Luis Villa: reminder for speakers/product plug  - Jul 11, 2007 Thomas Vander Stichele: Europython  - Jul 11, 2007 Luis Villa: what a tease (X and OOo)  - Jul 10, 2007

  2. open...: The Secret World of S5 on 11-Jul-07 at 1:56 pm

    Kramer auto Pingback[...] Hm, I’d somehow missed this before:S5 is a slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With one file, you can run a complete slide show and have a printer-friendly version as well. The markup used for the slides is very simple, highly semantic, and completely accessible. Anyone with even a smidgen of familiarity with HTML or XHTML can look at the markup and figure out how to adapt it to their particular needs. Anyone familiar with CSS can create their own slide show theme. It’s totally simple, and it’s totally standards-driven.Pity I don’t have any familiarity with CSS….(Via Luis Villa’s Blog.) [...]

  3. rawdog on 11-Jul-07 at 2:09 pm

    Kramer auto Pingback[...] Luis Villa: what a tease (X and OOo) [Planet GNOME] [...]