ShowOff Presentation Software
=============================

ShowOff is a Sinatra web app that reads simple configuration files for a
presentation.  It is sort of like a Keynote web app engine.  I am using it
to do all my talks in 2010, because I have a deep hatred in my heart for
Keynote and yet it is by far the best in the field.

The idea is that you setup your slide files in section subdirectories and
then startup the showoff server in that directory.  It will read in your
showoff.json file for which sections go in which order and then will give 
you a URL to present from.

It can:

 * show simple text
 * show images
 * show syntax highlighted code
 * bullets with incremental advancing
 * re-enact command line interactions
 * call up a menu of sections/slides at any time to jump around

It might will can:

 * do simple transitions (instant, fade, slide in)
 * show a timer - elapsed / remaining
 * perform simple animations of images moving between keyframes
 * show syncronized, hidden notes on another browser (like an iphone)
 * show audience questions / comments (twitter or direct)
 * let audience members go back / catch up as you talk
 * let audience members vote on sections (?)
 * broadcast itself on Bonjour 
 * let audience members download slides, code samples or other supplementary material

Some of the nice things are that you can easily version control it, you 
can easily move sections between presentations, and you can rearrange or 
remove sections easily. 

Usage
====================

To try ShowOff, clone this repo and run ./bin/showoff, which will start
up the Sinatra server and serve the examples/ directory. Eventually this
will be gemified and you can run it in any ShowOff directory.

Real World Usage
====================

So far, showoff has been used in the following presentations:

* LinuxConf.au 2010 - Wrangling Git - Scott Chacon 
  http://github.com/schacon/showoff-wrangling-git

If you use it for something, please let me know.

Future Plans
====================

Right now it comes with an example presentation (my LinuxConf.au talk)
that will probably change or go away at some point.  I would like this
to eventually be a general tool rather than having the presentation in
the showoff repo.  Eventually.  So you would install showoff as a gem
and then have just the presentation as your git repo (or whatever) and
run 'showoff' in the repo to start the presentation.

I really want this to evolve into a dynamic presentation software server,
that gives the audience a lot of interaction into the presentation - 
helping them decide dynamically what the content of the presentation is,
ask questions without interupting the presenter, etc.  I want the audience
to be able to download a dynamically generated PDF of either the actual
talk that was given, or all the available slides, plus supplementary 
material. And I want the presenter (me) to be able to push each 
presentation to Heroku or GitHub pages for archiving super easily.

Why Not S5 or Slidy or Slidedown?
=================================

S5 and Slidy are really cool, and I was going to use them, but mainly I wanted
something more dynamic.  I wanted Slidy + Slidedown, where I could write my
slideshows in a structured format in sections, where the sections could easily
be moved around and between presentations and could be written in Markdown. I
also like the idea of having interactive presentation system and didn't need
half the features of S5/Slidy (style based print view, auto-scaling, themes,
etc).

Requirements
============

* Ruby (duh)
* Sinatra (and thus Rack)
* BlueCloth
* Nokogiri
* Firefox or Chrome to present