A special site for exploring the outliner built into Radio UserLand.
The RadioPoint Tool
The RadioPoint Tool turns the outliner into a presentation authoring program.
History and overview
Back in 1986 I did a product called MORE that was at its core an outliner. We tried out lots of things that could be generated from outlines, including what we called then Bullet Charts. This formed into a category called Presentation Software, which was eventually led by PowerPoint. MORE came out just a few months before. Outlines are a really nice way to compose and edit presentations.
In 2000 we built a similar facility into Manila. You could use the Radio outliner to write a presentation and then use Manila to do the presenting. This means your presentation could live on the Web, so you didn't have to set up a laptop on the podium, you could do the presentation anywhere you had a Web browser. It was also nice to be able to point to the presentation from my weblog.
Now we're releasing an all-Radio presentation renderer. It's designed to be easy to use, as a complement to your Radio weblog. Now if you want to do a presentation, just create a new file in the outliner, and choose a command from a menu to render it as a slide show. You can of course edit the template, to make it look however you want it to.
Example
Here's an example of a presentation created with the RadioPoint Tool.
You can read the presentation in Radio's outliner as follows:
1. Copy this URL to your clipboard.
2. Switch over into Radio.
3. Choose Open URL from the File menu.
4. Paste the URL.
5. Click on OK.
Download and install
1. Download the RadioPoint Tool and save it into the Tools sub-folder of the Radio UserLand application folder.
2. You may have to quit and restart Radio to have it recognize the new tool.
Create a presentation outline
1. Bringing the Radio application to the front. (Windows users, right click on the Radio icon in the system tray; Mac OS X users choose it from the Dock.)
2. Choose the New command from the File menu.
3. Enter an outline. Each top-level headline is the name of a slide, each second-level line appears in the body of the slide. You can indent as many times as you like, the subheads will appear indented on the slide. Screen shot.
4. Save the outline. You can save it anywhere. I have a folder called Presentations where I save these outlines so I can easily find them later.
Building the HTML presentation
1. Bring the outline window to the front.
2. Choose Build Presentation from the RadioPoint sub-menu of the Tools menu.
3. To find the permanent public location of the presentation look on the Events page.
Folders and rendering
The tool automatically creates a sub-folder of the www folder called slides. It creates a default template for the slides in #template.txt. You can edit or change the template to get a different look for your slides. To edit the template choose the Edit Template command in the RadioPoint sub-menu of the Tools menu.
The slides sub-folder has a folder for each presentation and a sub-folder called outlines. If you have the preference enabled that includes a white-on-orange XML button for each presentation, a copy of each outline is placed in the outlines sub-folder, so it upstreams. This allows people to read your presentation in an OPML-compatible outliner.
Thanks to
Thanks to the following people for ideas for templates for presentations. Their names link to their examples.
Niklas Gustavsson, Tim Berners-Lee, Colin Faulkingham, Karl Dubost, Peter Gallagher, Russell Beattie, Paolo Valdemarin, Mark Gallagher.
Questions/comments
Please ask questions and post comments on the Radio-Outline mail list.
© Copyright 2000-2008 UserLand Software, Inc. Radio UserLand and Radio are trademarks of UserLand Software.
Last update: Friday, May 31, 2002 at 2:22:54 PM.
Email: webmaster@userland.com
