I recently gave a presentation to my colleagues at Videojuicer about HTML5 and what it means for our business and our technology roadmap. Being a mindless sheep, I did of course opt to create the presentation itself in HTML5 with the intention of having the audience follow along in their browsers, without the aid of a projector.
Then, a thought occurred.
If I’m putting a slide deck on screens that are owned by the audience, then the audience should get some control of their own.
Using this principle as a guide, I hacked up a quick Node.js and Socket.io demo that would allow audience members to either sit back and follow the presentation as I moved through the slides, or to break off from the flow and browse the deck themselves, rejoining the rest of the audience whenever they choose.
The presentation was a success, and I was struck by the creative potential of allowing audience members their own runtime instance of a slide deck. What’s possible with this setup that isn’t possible with a regular Keynote presentation? Including hyperlinks for audiences to follow for further reading is basic. We can do more:
I’ve since cleaned up this presentation engine and released it under the name Squeenote. Authoring presentations for Squeenote is ridiculously simple; a presentation is simply an HTML file containing an ordered list of slides. See the README for more information. Here’s the initial feature list:
Squeenote includes a short presentation about Squeenote, authored in Squeenote.
Squeenote is available for free at my Github profile. It’s released under a Creative Commons license as it is intended to be altered in a highly-personalised fashion.
