mb@munnari.UUCP (03/31/87)
Fellow Amigans!
The economists I'm working for think about pepping up their presentation
techniques. We've got an *%#-PC, but I would rather be in a position to
convince them that the Amiga is what they need.
They want:
Step 1: Replace the old overhead transparancies by a computer hooked up to
the conference center's video screen.
Step 2: Come up with really fancy presentation graphics which, e.g.:
o lets the graph crawl over the screen,
o fades parts of a slide in or out.
I believe that Aegis Impact could do Step 1. But I have no idea about Step 2.
I assume that hooking up an Amiga to a video screen/projector is no
difficulty at all, no?
I've seen some *%# Sales Reps doing a pitch using something like "Storyboard"
(I'm not sure about the name); is there an adequate program around?
Michael Bednarek (mb@munnari.oz.au)
"POST NO BILLS"hadeishi@husc7.UUCP (03/31/87)
I suppose it is a bit premature to be announcing a product here, but what the ----. Some of you may remember the cute little slideshow utility on the Electronic Arts Utility Disk #1, which allowed you to scroll and fade DPaint IFF images, driven by a script. Well, the next release has been enhanced in various ways, and among other things it supports full video (overscan displays), panning over large bitmaps, limited cross fading and partial picture fading (this is a hack involving color map twiddling, but it is easy to set up a picture to do the latter in DPaint, and somewhat more difficult to the the former with DPaint II w/ stencils), and other things which have yet to be implemented, so I won't announce them here. In any case, it sounds like the basics of what you want to do (scroll graphs, fade in portions of images at a time) can be done with the cute utility. They (EA) keep on asking me to add features to the thing (after they saw what the current version could do, they decided to make it a relatively full-blown slideshow presentation utility) so it may be a while before it finally gets out there. If I weren't in school, it'd be done in a few weeks, but I'm in school. I'm working frantically on it over Spring Break (yeah, I know, but I have to pay for my wife's trip to London this week somehow) and I hope to get all of the new features implemented by the end of the week. What you will see is a fairly simple but flexible presentation utility which can do quite a lot for you, although of course it won't automatically generate graphs from input data or anything like that (but what else is multitaking for? Use a dedicated graphing utility.) But if you're willing to graph it on your PC, copy it over using a Bridge card, gussy it up in DPaint II, and then plop it onto your RAMdisk and fire up SlideShow concurrently, I suspect you'd have a pretty flexible and powerful video presentation environment on your hands. (Or, you could graph it with Impact!, and fiddle with DPaint II to get sections of it ready to be faded in/out, and then fire up SlideShow, or, or, or . . . Now THAT's what I call synergy!) -Mitsu