slidePresenter

I’ve decided to go ahead with Thomas Epineer’s tesUpload as the basis for providing an upload progress meter in slidePresenter.  Unfortunately, in spite of Thomas’ great work in modifying the original megaupload script (by Raditha Dissanyake) for use with AJAX, it needs further tweaking to be of real use for slidePresenter.  I’m currently in the process of hacking on it and pulling the pieces together to make it work.  It’s been a long time since I worked in perl, though, so even this simple task is taking longer than I expected.  Tonight I committed some substantial changes to svn.  Next I’ll need to add some type of authentication for the perl script, since as it is it pretty much uploads anything it receives without concern for what it is or who sent it, which is not really acceptable for slidePresenter.

As of version 0.10, slidePresenter provides an interface for uploading slide images — either one at a time or in a .zip archive; slidePresenter then automatically imports those images into the presentation. It’s an AJAX-style upload that aims at doing the whole thing without a page refresh, so for the user it should seem like one quick step. So far, though, it doesn’t offer any indication to the user of the upload’s progress. For large archives of many images, this can be rather unnerving.

I’m working on one solution to this nuisance: a real-time progress indicator for the file upload. But it’s not as simple as some other things. First of all, it’s an unfortunate fact that this can’t be done with only PHP, not without compiling in a special patch. Several people have played around with using a small CGI script in perl or another language to help out.

Thomas Epineer’s tesUpload is a great example of this idea in an AJAX context. It’s actually a wonderful thing, and I’m playing around with ways to use it for slidePresenter. I don’t like the fact that it requires a configuration file to be located one level above the system docroot, because it seems inflexible and hard to explain to new users; but, I think there’s a way to get around that. If there’s not, there’s not, and tesUpload seems otherwise close enough to what slidePresenter needs that I’m strongly considering it regardless.

Hopefully we can come up with a real-time upload progress indicator that is also a no-brainer to install.

Daniel Lemire, computer science professor up at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) says slidePresenter is just what he’s been looking for:

I have been looking long and hard for a way to project slides remotely. I once proposed, on my site, that the ideal solution might be AJAX-based. I used with some success Webhuddle and even wrote a script to convert PDF files to a zip file of gif images for this purpose, but I don’t like to rely on a Java applet. I further tested Vyew which is AJAX-based, but found that it had unacceptable limitations (like the 50 slides limit!).

Finally, I found what I was looking for! slidePresenter is a great piece of software you can install on your server.

See the rest of Daniel’s review for more.

slidePresenter 0.11 was released late last night with fixes for two bugs found in version 0.10.

The first caused “access denied” errors for all AJAX calls, preventing the Viewer interface, and other things, from working properly. The second was a problem with PHP sessions which caused slidePresenter to require PHP’s session.auto_start setting to be “On,” without which no administrative interfaces could be used.

Thanks to Daniel Lemire for reporting the errors.

I just posted slidePresenter version 0.10 to the sourceforge site. You can get it here.

slidePresenter 0.10 primarily targets the Project Roadmap item, “Creation and management of presentations: provide a graphic interface so users don’t have to edit config files for each presentation”. This release completely meets that item, and includes a single administrative account for creation and management of presentations.

Note that the slidePresenter demo does not contain these features — only Viewer and Presenter interfaces for actually viewing/presenting the Sample presentation. It seems unwise to allow the whole Web population to create and manage presentations on this server.