[Edu-sig] Writing presentation manager for OSCON, in Pygame

[Kirby Urner]

> From: edu-sig-bounces at python.org [mailto:edu-sig-bounces at python.org] On
> Behalf Of Guido van Rossum
> Sent: Monday, July 18, 2005 12:05 PM
> To: Dethe Elza
> Cc: edu-sig at python.org; Kirby Urner
> Subject: Re: [Edu-sig] Writing presentation manager for OSCON, in Pygame
> 
> At EuroPython I saw several PyGame-based presentations. Armin Rigo has
> been doing this for years and with impressive results (visualizing
> Greenlets for example). But the best one I saw was Gustavo Niemeyer's
> Solving Puzzles with Python:
> http://www.python-in-business.org/ep2005/talk.chtml?talk=1194&track=687
> 
> Very cool visalizations of the puzzles and their solutions.

Yes. I also recall a Pygame-based presentation of how Psyco works.

One of the Europython 5 min talks was on the need to work on a presentation
package that provides features missing from PowerPoint (e.g. the source
code).  

I don't have a way to actually access the shell from *within* Pygame (access
to the Python shell without fiddling with windows being a desirable
feature), but as I boot from IPython with a slide-number argument (default
0), I *am* able to easily drop out to shell by escaping from pygame (runs
full screen), and then resume at the appropriate place.

I envision my talk featuring both this Pygame thing, and the geometry-based
VPython hypertoon during Q&A (like I did at Europython).  BTW, my hypertoons
article was accepted and is supposedly queued for publication in Pyzine any
day now :-D.

Kirby

PS:  I copied John Zelle my latest draft of the presentation manager per his
special interest.  John, your prototypes sound way more sophisticated (given
your eventual goal of mixing in VR) than my lowly effort, as you'll shortly
see.  My API is still evolving e.g. some very basic parameters, such as
slide title font color, are hard coded for now.  I tend to hard code a lot
to get things moving, then go back later and tease an API out of it, so that
all parameters eventually come under programmatic control -- we hope in an
easy-enough way.