{"id":188,"date":"2009-04-22T01:54:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-21T13:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/?p=188"},"modified":"2009-04-22T01:54:00","modified_gmt":"2009-04-21T13:54:00","slug":"slideshows-without-slideshow-software","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/slideshows-without-slideshow-software\/","title":{"rendered":"Slideshows without slideshow software"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I use a Mac, but not only don&#8217;t I want to pay for PowerPoint, but I also don&#8217;t want to pay for Keynote.  So I like creating slideshows with image-editing software.  At the moment I use <a href=\"http:\/\/www.skitch.com\/\">Skitch<\/a> because though it&#8217;s not very powerful, it&#8217;s ridiculously easy to use.  (By contrast, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gimp.org\/\">GIMP<\/a> isn&#8217;t easy to use but is ridiculously powerful.)<\/p>\n<p>Once I have a bunch of images, I import them into iPhoto.  I create an album containing them all in order.  Then I make it into a slideshow.  I have a &#8220;next slide&#8221; clicker that came with my MacBook and it&#8217;s all beautiful.<\/p>\n<p>The problem I&#8217;ve had was wanting to upload to SlideShare, which wants powerpoint, keynote, or pdf format, and I couldn&#8217;t find a way to turn images into pdfs.  I&#8217;ve kludged it by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pptfaq.com\/FAQ00050.htm\">importing the images into PowerPoint<\/a> on my work machine, then uploading that, but it&#8217;s a nuisance.<\/p>\n<p>Today while playing with Automator, I discovered it has a &#8220;New PDF from images&#8221; task.  So I created a workflow:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Ask for Finder items (prompts for a folder containing a bunch of images)<\/li>\n<li>Copy Finder items (to eg the Desktop)<\/li>\n<li>Get folder contents<\/li>\n<li>Scale images (to 480 pixels &#8211; because it&#8217;s only for the web)<\/li>\n<li>New PDF from images (with &#8220;Size each page to fit&#8221;)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>For bonus geek points, I saved this workflow as &#8220;Make a slideshow&#8221; in my Speakable Items folder.  So now I can tell my computer, &#8220;Make a slideshow&#8221;, it asks me where to find the images, then it creates a PDF which I can upload to SlideShare.<\/p>\n<p>If you don&#8217;t have a Mac there&#8217;s probably another way to do this &#8211; but I doubt it&#8217;s as cool.<\/p>\n<p>&#8212;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.prezi.com\/\">Prezi<\/a> is getting a fair bit of press at the moment for its non-linear style.  It is very cool, though very high-powered (and I&#8217;m too cheap for it).  But I&#8217;ve been thinking more and more that for infolit classes, a slideshow that acted like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure would be really useful &#8211; so you didn&#8217;t have to go through from slide 1 to slide 99, but could ask students a question and change the direction of the presentation to suit their answer.  The &#8220;bunch of slides&#8221; format still works for me; I just want internal hyperlinks.  But I&#8217;m not happy with the slideshow html templates I&#8217;ve seen, either.<\/p>\n<p>Thinking about this, I realised what it is that I want for my slideshows:  <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/HyperCard\">Hypercard<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><wanders off, reminiscing about the Good Old Days><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I use a Mac, but not only don&#8217;t I want to pay for PowerPoint, but I also don&#8217;t want to pay for Keynote. So I like creating slideshows with image-editing software. At the moment I use Skitch because though it&#8217;s not very powerful, it&#8217;s ridiculously easy to use. (By contrast, GIMP isn&#8217;t easy to use [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[188,189],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}