slidePresenter

With version 0.20, slidePresenter can now give the user a real-time genuine report on upload progress. For small files this is not particularly important, but users who upload large files may be able to appreciate the value of knowing how far along the upload is going, and even that it’s progressing at all.

This all comes from an exchange with slidePresenter user Daniel Lemire, who I believe is actually waiting for the next better feature: a command-line script to import slides that are already on the server, thus avoiding the need to upload large files over HTTP at all. Look to the next release for this feature.

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.

Today, with the release of slidePresenter-0.03, I added support for localization of all on-screen text to the language of your choice. It made sense to try and do this as soon as possible, before the interface got more complex. At this stage, there are only three strings to handle.

Translation submissions are welcome.

We also now have better error handling, at least sufficient to provide meaningful error messages without revealing directory structures.

The Project Roadmap now reflects these changes, and the user interface for “Creation and management of presentations” has moved into the top spot to be next for implementation. This will be a major step forward in ease-of-use, as we’ll eliminate most if not all direct management of configuration files. Expect to see this in the next week or so.

In the sidebar of this site you’ll now see a section labelled “Stats,” which shows so far the latest version of slidePresenter available and the date it was released, plus a running count of the number of downloads. At this point, with the project in release 0.03, less than a week old, and having less than 100 downloads, it’s interesting to watch those numbers change. To be hontest, I am impressed and honored to see that anyone has made use of this program.

After much dilly-dallying about all the great features I could include in this thing, I decided it was silly to try and pack in anything more than necessary right from the start.  Download it here.

Right now slidePresenter works by updating the “src” attribute of an tag.  This already makes it different from Jaisen Mathai’s very nice slide presentation script, which works by updating the innerHTML of “slide title” and “slide body” elements.  That’s actually a good feature, and I’m adding it to the list of possibilities for slidePresenter.

There are actually plenty of other features that could be incorporated into this tool, but I will wait to hear if any improvements would be even slightly useful for others.  For myself, it’s workable enough that I’ll take it, and improve it as needed.  Because I’m such a slacker, it’s easy for me to sit hours and build things that might never actually get used, just because they’re nifty.  As an act of self-discipline, I’m limiting myself to 8 hours working on this program for each download.  Of course, that allowance will change once I’ve crossed a few dozen downloads, I’m sure; but whether or not that ever happens remains to be seen.

In the mean time, I’ll be watching the stats and keeping track of bugs and potential new features.

Kind responses from Jaisen Mathai over the past couple of days. In one vein he’s responded to my pleas for help — the code I downloaded from his site, from his ZendCon presentation, seems not to work for me. In another vein, he says he’s happy to contribute the code to a GPL project like slidePresenter.

I don’t think the code will be released as a project due to the time involved in doing so. However, you can do with the code as you like. It would be cool to see a freely available version.

Thanks,

Jaisen

…

That’s great if you are wanting to include some of the code in a GPL-licensed project. I might be inclined to contribute to it if time permits.

Keep me posted on your progress.

Jaisen

I’m still working to get that code going, though I’m sure it’s more a reflection on my own ineptitude than anything else.

Meanwhile, I have plenty of other things to work on, including features like user authorization, basic permissions, and uploading of image files. Watch this space for actual code soon.