Best wishes on your presentation, Kirby!At the Vancouver Python Conference last year, Paul Prescod joked that I was the only one writing my own presentation software. I also used PyGame, but in my case each "slide" was a mini-game (or game-in- progress). I'll note that it was the last time I ever used PyGame and I would have abandoned it sooner if I hadn't committed to doing a presentation about it. It reminded me of doing programming on the Mac in the 68K days, when you had to write your own main loop, your own event management, etc. Very primitive. If I need slide-show type presentations these days, I tend to go with S5[1] using Safari or Firefox.
On the other hand, the next presentation I did for Paul (at the VanPyZ monthly meeting last February), I wrote the presentation software using Cocoa (OS X framework), Python, XML, and Renaissance (framework for turning XML into Cocoa UI). So perhaps I am a glutton for punishment.
--Dethe [1] http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ On 18-Jul-05, at 11:18 AM, Kirby Urner wrote:
Sort of relevant to the queries below, I'm developing source materials for my upcoming presentation at OSCON 2005. I've determined that using closed source presentation software i.e. PowerPoint, would not be appropriate tothis venue (smart me, huh?), and furthermore, using Impress or otherOpenOffice-like PPT clone wouldn't be sufficiently Pythonic. Ergo, I'mwriting my own presentation management software in Pygame.The basic structure is an outer event loop driven by keystrokes (no mouse) and rather few of them at that (left/right arrow, Stop, Restart, Pause,Unpause). Class definitions define slide content in terms of variousresources: Autoflipimage, Movieplayer, Scrolltextfile, Stillimage and soon. Each slide is composed by a function, which calls the necessaryparameters on the resources, all of which get sent as a list to a Scene object, which actually operates the content objects at runtime (e.g. bypassing through keystrokes).Resources with internal dynamism (e.g. an Autoflipimage or MPEG movie clip) get their own threads, i.e. are subclassed from threading.Thread (plus an interface-like mixin). This is necessary to keep the outmost keystroke thread alive to the keyboard (it wouldn't do to get sucked into a resource and have to sit through a boring MPEG, even if you were ready to move on).In other words, I've leveraging that I know how to code, to cut right to the runtime display engine, completely bypassing / ignoring any need for GUI tools to define and structure the slides at design time. That's all done "programmatically" as they say -- which is too much work for most office cubies, but is far less work than coding a design time GUI, if you're a one-man-year-per-year type shop (my shop is somewhat more than that, butthis OSCON thing I'm doing on my own time).I'm going to upload all this stuff with the GPL once my talk is done. I want the first venue (the showcase debut) to be at OSCON itself (first weekin August, here in PDX). On my next Saturday Academy gig, I'll plan to keep using this Python + Pygame solution, as I'll be able to guide 'em around the source code, illustrating how one can do a lot with Python in < 1K lines of code. Kirby-----Original Message-----From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:edu-sig- [EMAIL PROTECTED] OnBehalf Of Peter Bowyer Sent: Saturday, July 09, 2005 2:58 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Edu-sig] SOT: authoring course material Hi,As I sit down to write my course material I was wondering - what software do you use? Traditionally material in the physics department has always been written in LaTeX (uugh), with a printed copy given to the student,and a PDF of the printed copy available online.I need to produce a printable set of notes, but would also like to do atrue web-based version. We've talked about testing the students withonline multiple-choice quizzes and I'm keen to have expandable sections of the notes online (so the more advanced students don't have to read the basics, but can see advanced questions the others cannot). However, frompast experience if there are not full printed notes there will becomplaints, and as the computers aren't dual-monitor it would be hard toread online notes while working. What have you found works when teaching introductory programming?Also, have you found tools such as wikis useful when either developing theteaching material or writing the following report? Thanks, Peter _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig_______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
Life is extinct on other planets. Their scientists were more advanced than ours. --Mark Russell
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
_______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
