April 30, 2007

Yes, w e now have a working version of SlideySide! You can take a look at this slide and follow it to the others. SlidelySlide automatically generates a Cover Page, helping you navigate to different individual slides. Maybe 5th grade level?

It's primitive and rudimentary, but it has the beginnings, I hope, of some useful functionality. Starting with basic outline information, SlideySlide creates HTML pages corresponding to each slide. There are a few things that are really cool about this: 1) you can view them on ANY platform that runs a browser, 2) you can view them on offline, mobile computers as easily as you can view them from a connected web server, 3) there's a lot you can do to customize pages in standards-based ways.

The HTML pages are linked together with next / previous / last / home navigation links. There is the ability to apply basic background colors (and I'd like to generalize this to allow for easy CSS-specified formatting.) The current version even allows the display of "speaker notes" on individual slides you specify. More needs to be done - transitions, elaborating on integration with Hackety Hack. I am dreaming about the differnent kinds of things to do with ask_color() and thinking about the best way to concentrate on learning lessons to share from this.

SlideySlide is currently barren of colorful graphics, but that will be added. We had a big development today - a young artist in our household contributed the newest team member. Pease join me in welcoming Broccoli Head.