Create Pure HTML5 Slides with free Google Page Template

Cut the cord to PowerPoint, Keynote, Prezi, PDF and more, and create and display your slide presentations in pure HTML5 using the free html5slides project from Google. Download the single web page template from Google code to your local machine. This single file contains the HTML5 layout and sample content for a great many slide types. Edit in your own content with copy and paste using your simple HTML editor or even Notepad. Use your modern browser to show your slides. Simple.

Try out Google’s sample presentation in your browser.

A smattering of HTML5 like this:

<article>
  <h3>
    Slide with bullet points and a longer title, just because we
    can make it longer
  </h3>
  <ul>
    <li>
      Use this template to create your presentation
    </li>
    <li>
      Use the provided color palette, box and arrow graphics, and
      chart styles
    </li>
    <li>
      Instructions are provided to assist you in using this
      presentation template effectively
    </li>
    <li>
      At all times strive to maintain Google's corporate look and feel
    </li>
  </ul>
</article>

will display:

There are some choices in themes and layout, and according to Google html5slides ‘should work on modern Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera… and generally touch devices’.

Thanks to Steve Dalton, @spidie, for giving a talk about this at BarcampBNE at the November meeting.

Pancake.io Provides an Even Simpler Web Site Based on a Dropbox Folder

Pancake.io is a web service that allows one of your Dropbox folders to become a web site capable of showing a collection of files that automatically display as public web pages. I thank colleague @PetaHopkins for the heads-up.

Back in March this year I posted about DropPages.com, a way to turn a Dropbox folder into a web site. My test site at mrees.droppages.com still works well. A free DropPages account gives you a URL and allows the download of a set of files giving you a fairly sophisticated web site with templates and styles. Straightforward but not easy.

Pancake is much, much simpler. Get your free account at Pancake.io and grant it access permission to create the Pancake.io folder in your Dropbox files. Then just add files to your Dropbox folder, and each will be served as web page. Supported files are:

Text (.txt)
Markdown (.md)
JPEG (.jpg, .jpeg)
PNG (.png)
GIF (.gif)
PDF (.pdf)
Word (.doc, .docx)
Excel (.xls, .xlsx)
Powerpoint (.ppt, .pptx)

Find the URL for each page in your Pancake.io dashboard. I created the home.txt file and its URL as at http://pancake.io/823a85/home. I put a small PDF file of slides in the same folder. The text files can be edited on the Pancake.io site or, of course, with any text editor from all machines with access to your Dropbox files. I added the script provided to embed the list of files in the home.txt file. Simple and impressive.

The downsides are an obscure web site address, but you can use a URL shortener, and Pancake hint at using your own domain soon. Our old friend Markdown syntax is also present again as all text files go though the Markdown filter. Fortunately if the text content looks like HTML then it is rendered correctly.

A much-needed icon for web apps

I think this is a much needed attempt to put up a standard logo to indicate a web page is acting as a web app, especially when viewed on a mobile device. Developers take note.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/11/mobile-web-apps-get-a-dedicate.php

Types of Personal Cloud Solutions

I have been a user of 25 GB free SkyDrive for a number of years as it has gone through many guises. For full synchronisation between SkyDrive and local files on your computers you need to add Live Mesh which has lower storage limits.

How do you compare this offering with other personal cloud solutions. From the ReadWriteWeb post on how Windows 8 will bring a personal cloud to billions we see Microsoft introducing some cloud solution granularity to aid user choice:

Omar Shahine and Mike Torres outlined three distinct categories of personal cloud solutions:

1. File clouds; using the traditional file and folder structure. Examples: SkyDrive, Dropbox
2. Device clouds; "A device-centric view of cloud storage "hides" the folders from you." Example: iCloud
3. App clouds; "they fully embrace the cloud [and] can enable new ways to collaborate, organize, and share." Examples: Google Docs, Evernote

From Ebooks to Esites

Especially via our institution’s Yammer activity stream (private Twitter) I and several of my colleagues raise awareness of the evolution of ebooks with their serial information metaphor to what are becoming know as rich media ebooks amongst other names with their highly interactive model. Possibly one of the typical examples is the iPad-specific Inkling platform with about 100 textbook titles across a range of disciplines. Inkling retains the ‘book’ distribution model where the reader pays to download an electronic lump that contains all the rich media – text, images, audio, video, and interactive elements. Admittedly Inkling textbooks can be purchased in smaller chapter lumps.

Just a few days ago a colleague, Allan S, alerted us on Yammer about reactive documents:

Really interesting way of interacting with your web documents - "reactive documents" uses a JavaScript API to allow every word to become an 'explorable analysis'.

Allan pointed us to the Explorable Explanations project created by Bret Victor that allows authors to create reactive documents which take several steps towards genuine rich media ebooks. Try out the examples especially the one Allan liked, the digital filter.

However if you are a budding author of a rich media ebook your doubts might be raised with the need to use a ‘JavaScript API’. As well as a writer you also need some programming skills. Then you need to add skills in graphic design, audio-visual creation/editing and an understanding of user interaction and behaviour.

Going further you need to understand the hosting and deployment of web sites – the only sensible cross-platform technology currently available. After all you will want your reactive rich media content to evolve over time, won’t you? Web site technology allows your readers access to your rich media ebook on all ereader platforms not to mention the wide range of other reading devices such as smartphones, tablets, ultrabooks and desktops.

It is clear by now that your rich media ebook has become an interactive web site or esite. Since it is unlikely you will have the range of skills just listed your esite must be built by a multi-disciplinary team either assembled by you or your publisher. We might expect software developers to create suitable authoring tools eventually that will significantly ease the authorship process. Even so authors intending to join the rich media ebook movement should expect to bone up on their 21st century skills that includes some scripting/programming knowledge and a familiarity with new media creation.

Start thinking esites not ebooks. A corollary is to forget native apps unless they are backed by an esite and are generated automatically by your esite authoring tool.

Beta Testers Delight, an AWS EC2 AMI to Chew On

Not so long ago I was on the lowest rung of the Microsoft Partner ladder. Initially I received box loads of DVDs each quarter with the latest development and server software. Often it was several weeks after I needed the install disks, but I never used more than 10% of them. Then Microsoft moved to OTA distribution and I only needed to download those disk images that I actually needed, and I received them as soon as they were available. A big improvement except it tore a big hole in the Internet data cap.

This big distribution improvement did nothing for the next problem which was to find a physical or virtual machine on which to install and test the new software. But now even that chore has vanished. Joe Brockmeier reports on an ideal solution for beta testing new Microsoft servers in a post entitled ‘Amazon Spins Up Microsoft SQL Server 2012 on AWS for Testing’.

Amazon recently announced the availability of Windows Server 2008 R2 in its range of EC2 machine instances, AMIs. Now they have made available an AMI with SQL Server 2012 (Denali) community preview running on Windows Server. All beta testers need do is head to their AWS account and fire up the SQL Server 2012 AMI. In a few minutes they are testing the new version with no massive downloads, no local machine to find, and Internet data caps largely unaffected. Brilliant! Surely all new server software should now be made available this way.

Pity I am a Microsoft Partner no longer! I done ‘gone Google’ a year or so ago.

Time to Store All Cloud Data in Dynamic Memory

It is fairly clear we are at a point when purchasing personal workstations consisting of tablets, ultrabooks and laptops that only solid state drives, SSDs, make sense. There are huge performance benefits and the generally lower capacity of an SSD compared to a hard disk drive, HDD, of similar cost is not a problem with apps and data rapidly migrating to the cloud.

One might imagine that the cloud data itself, though, being so massive, must necessarily be stored on massive arrays of HDDs that is currently the case. It therefore stretches belief to find recent research indicating that the most cost effective way to store cloud data from now on is to use massive arrays of standard dynamic random access memory, DRAM. The article by Scott Fulton entitled ‘Stanford: Move the Cloud from Disk to DRAM’ summarises the paper by Ousterhout et al that introduces the punchy concept of RAMClouds. The argument relies on the 3-year cost of ownership for large datasets taken from the second figure in the paper:

I expect this to be an historic turning point for cloud infrastructure and totally unexpected. RAMClouds will have an absolutely major impact on cloud services from the performance perspective and well as the design and siting of data centers. I can’t wait to see the effects.

Major Shifts in IT Encore

Great diagrams convey information to all readers with utter simplicity. I think the diagram below by Dion Hinchcliffe conveys complex IT trends with pure clarity. I simply have nothing to add except the appearance of cloud in the context of this blog is important.

See Dion’s post for a much more detailed commentary on these weighty matters.

The First Truly Shareable Computer

As Cliff Boodoosingh points out in in his post ‘Get a Library Card & Borrow a Chromebook’:

Here’s a novel idea: go to the library and borrow a Chromebook.

This is what is happening in Hillsborough Library in Hillsborough, New Jersey. With Wi-Fi already available throughout the library the borrower simply opens the Chromebook lid, and within a couple of seconds logins in with a Google account and is connected with the cloud. Even better is at logout all trace of that user leaves the Chromebook ready for the next library patron – the Chromebook is a genuine shareable computer.

It gets better again since no power point is needed, the bane of most libraries because of insurance liability requirements. The Chromebook’s 8-hour battery life is good enough for a day’s heavy usage. At Hillsborough the rental period is 4 hours with up to a 2-hour extension.

I wonder when and if this service will arrive at my local Gold Coast Library?

Code Snippet Archive to Benefit Everyone

I just saw a very useful jQuery code snippet from @aneesha in one of her tweets:

jquery to hide or show columns in a table $('td:nth-child(2)').toggle();

I don’t need this code today but probably could use in the future. Where should I store it for safe keeping? Indeed where should Aneesha store it for all software devs to use?

I have been storing such coding gems in my Evernote repository (great for me), and I can even make my Evernote notes available to everyone (only great if everyone can find them). This is not a good solution for a really useful repository and permanent curation.

However I did come across a much more useful solution when I attended the BrisJS meetup earlier this week. Pete Chappell gave a lightning talk about hashbangs and he put his notes/slides/code examples in the gist repository collection on github. As all developers have long known github has become the popular place to store shared, distributed repositories of code/data/text documents of all kinds.

You don’t have to be a software developer to find these repositories useful, they can be used for web sites, large structured documents, data collections and so on. git and github are supported on all hardware platforms.

github says of gist:

Gist is a simple way to share snippets and pastes with others. All gists are git repositories, so they are automatically versioned, forkable [copied, cloned] and usable as a git repository.

You can create both public and private gists and update them to new versions as time goes by. All the public gists are searchable and there is an immense treasure trove of code and data samples there, both big and small. Pete Chappell’s gist is number 1,258,359 for example.

If you have text-based data of any kind you want to share publically or privately long-term then gists are for you. OK, Aneesha?

Writing Faster Programs about to be Harder and Harder

The computer-buying public have known for a year or two that individual central processing units or cores have ceased increasing in speed. The faster computers on the shelves need multiple cores. The same is becoming true for smartphones and tablets that now need multiple cores to be faster. But heed the warning from Steve Blackburn in his post on ‘Performance anxiety: the end of software’s free ride’. Writing software that runs faster from here on in is going to be very difficult indeed.

As Steve points out we have known how hard it is to write software to keep our multiple cores executing at the same time, ie parallel processing. He cites the simple example:

just as two cars are unlikely to get you to work faster than one, the addition of another core is often unhelpful in completing a computing problem more quickly

In the last 30 years of my computing experience the advances in writing parallel programs have been slight. So this is the first hard problem.

We used to think it was easier to make all the cores the same but it is now becoming clear we need a hierarchy of cores with varying power to control them efficiently – ‘ many designers now believe that we need a more complex combination of simple and powerful cores on each chip’. so ‘ heterogeneity takes us even further from the world of transparent performance improvements’.

Steve then reveals the problem of giving enough power to lots of cores on one chip. There is an obvious physical limit.

In practice, power densities on chip have become so high that we can no longer fully power an entire chip lest we melt the silicon. This radically changes the economics of microarchitecture.

Thus software developers must now optimise for energy consumption, not performance – a completely new approach will be needed. New optimisation algorithms will be needed.

The hard problem of parallelism still lies unsolved after decades. We computer scientists are going to have to do a lot better with the heterogeneity and energy optimisation hard problems if smartphone/tablet/laptop/desktop performance is not to stagnate. A dim prospect indeed unless some new lateral thinking can come to the rescue.

Customised Social Network Connections, if this then that

As a computer scientist I am naturally attracted to the simple conditional statement programming paradigm of a new web app that allows you to connect status updates between your favourite social networks. ifttt or ‘if this then that’ leverages the ‘if-then-else’ conditional statement, one of the three major building blocks of all programming languages. You connect your social networks by a simple collection of if this then that rules that yield a highly customised set of connections.

This is an example of a rule or task as ifttt calls it. The ‘this’ part is a specified event on trigger channel, a typical activity on your chosen social network or channel. I chose a check-in with a photo in my task. For the ‘that’ part I chose to upload the photo on Foursquare to a chosen album on my Facebook account. It works extremely well and took only 30 seconds to establish.

ifttt comes with several default channels but it is very straightforward to add your own social networks. My list is on the left. I have used less than half of the social networks (channels) supported.

Each channel typically has two of more possible actions from which you choose. Some actions require parameters which are entered via simple forms. For example, I was able to define the message content that accompanies my photo when it finds its way into Facebook. You can see that my 17 channels allow 1485 different possible task combinations.

A simple ‘{{ … }}’ notation is used to transfer key information from the trigger to the action such as {{VenueMapImageURL}} from the Foursquare check-in in my example. ifttt checks for triggers every 15 minutes so the typical delay in the action being executed is half that time.

For me one of the key omissions at the moment is a Google+ channel, but of course we need the API to be extended from its current read-only capability before ifttt can make use of Google+ in a full-featured way. ifttt is free and easy to get an invite by leaving your email on their web site.