Jon Aquino's Mental Garden

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Tuesday, February 12, 2008

QuickSlide: Create slides from your browser's address bar

Here's another little site I've been working on: QuickSlide. It lets you create good-looking slides using your browser's address bar.

For example,
http://quickslide.ning.com?q=QuickSlide<div class="subtitle">Simplicity. Power.</div>
Fli3CE8

You get a nice dark backdrop, and centered text at a good size.

You can also add a picture – one of the built-in leaf images, or an image of your own:
http://quickslide.ning.com?q=<img width="450" src="leaf1.png">Improvements
Fli3C66

http://quickslide.ning.com?q=<img width="300" src="leaf2.png"><br />Music
Fli3BF8

To add a reflection to an image, use class="reflect":
http://quickslide.ning.com?q=<img width="300" src="leaf4.png" class="reflect">Reflection
Fli3B09

If you use YubNub, you can generate slides using the qsl command. Here's a slide that shows a random number:
qsl { random 100 }
Fli3B98

QuickSlide source code

posted by Jonathan at 2/12/2008 10:21:00 p.m.

10 Comments:

  • Very nice, Jon, very nice.

    Always glad to see you giving Yubnub some love, too.

    Now you've got the presentation thing down are you going to be hitting the conference circuit, David S.-style?

    By Blogger Thomas David Baker, at 2/13/2008 3:19 a.m.  

  • Ha! Thanks Tom.

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 2/13/2008 9:23 p.m.  

  • Incidentally, this technique can be used to do presentations on an iPhone. If you ever needed to do a presentation on an iPhone, that is.

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 2/13/2008 9:23 p.m.  

  • For those who are into the Takahashi presentation method, you can use http://quickslide.ning.com/?takahashi=yes&q=WHY

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 2/14/2008 9:03 p.m.  

  • Very nice Jon, very nice. Ideas for further development (based on what a friend has been telling me about the Google Chart API which creates a chart image based on a URL):

    How about a script that inserts an interactive slideshow (with simple controls) into a webpage, based purely on URL with parameters i.e.

    <script src="http://url.to/slideshow.js?slide1(paramA, paramB),slide2(paramA, paramB)..." />

    Is that possible? Oh, even better, use the <object> element and pull in a full slideshow (based on a) URL into the page - if you can insert simple controls with that method too, that would be awesome.

    Does this make any sense? The point being there would be two outcomes:

    1. Be able to embed an easy to create slideshow anywhere, on any webpage, using open standards
    2. Create an ENTIRE slideshow from one URL.

    How's that for a challenge Jon? I expect a solution by Monday morning ;-)

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 2/24/2008 3:22 p.m.  

  • I can see this spinning off into an entire company with Mr. Lloyd's help :)

    The Google Chart API works well because they are encoding numeric values and achieve some compression using characters to represent values. It's not great for anything with a reasonable number of figures though - you have to simplify your data before handing it off to Google.

    The same problem would apply in spades here. The limit on the length of URLs (2000 chars?) would force you to keep your slides terse. Your audience might be glad for that, though :)

    By Blogger Thomas David Baker, at 2/24/2008 3:34 p.m.  

  • Thanks Paul and Tom for the ideas. Neat idea about JavaScript and Object versions!

    The slideshow-as-url idea was definitely inspired by the Google Chart API.

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 2/24/2008 5:27 p.m.  

  • We still have that 'MeatPie' name floating around don't we Jon… ;-)

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 2/25/2008 2:08 p.m.  

  • That random number slide is kind of ironic.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 3/15/2008 11:44 p.m.  

  • :)

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 3/16/2008 10:50 p.m.  

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