info-mac@uw-beaver (02/07/85)
From: Bill Croft <croft@safe> At Stanford we use a video projector at our user group meetings to show new programs and give "Mac slide shows". Some people have been using the Magnum Software "Slide Show Magician". In fact I was using (or trying to use it) in front of our group recently, and was quite embarrassed when it totally refused to read the "script" for my show. The same disks that failed on the demo machine, worked fine on three different Macs back in my office. What gives? Well I discovered this: as a "feature", the Magnum Software puts bad sectors on your nice clean disks. They record special copy protection sectors on top of your script file whenever you "save" it. This is bad design, but it usually works. However if you are using a different machine for the final demo, and it happens to have a very slightly out of spec disk drive, you can kiss your presentation goodbye. Apple II users will recognize these problems, I'm sure; the copy protection schemes in use there are in some cases very disk drive dependent. At any rate, here's my solution: the C source and binhex binaries for a very simple and easy to use "slide projector". It is called "slide". It uses the same "slide format" as the Magnum program: just simple MacPaint documents. There is a template provided called "slideblank" that you should use as a guide in positioning your material. Basically your pictures must be in the upper left corner of the MacPaint "physical page". "slideblank" has the four rounded screen corners, and two off screen lines to show you the limits of this area. Be careful not to move these bits on the physical page (you can move the viewing window, but don't move the actual page dots in "show page" mode). "slideblank" also has a single dot positioned where I usually start the first line of my text or graphics. I found the grid lock mode very handy for lining up the blocks of text. The slide order is determined by the MacPaint file names. Only one slide show can be stored per disk. The file names have the form "NumberName", for example "1title", "2overview", "3goals", etc. Only the number part of the file name determines the slide order. You can use numbers as large as you like (16000 max); I suppose basic fans might number their slides 10, 20, 30, etc. You can also use fractions to "insert" slides, e.g.: "1.2credits". You could set the numbers at the time of creation with MacPaint, or go back latter with the Finder and touch up the slide ordering. The mouse can be used to sketch on the screen. Spacebar advances to the next slide. Backspace reverses. --Bill Croft, SUMEX project, Stanford Univ. [Stored on <info-mac> as slide.shar (C source), slide.hcx (program) and slideblank.hcx (blank slide)]