I love Prezi for rad presentations that people remember. Now it supports iPad. Awesome!
Prezi for iPad (via prezi29)
ProPresenter 4 is out for Mac (Windows version on the way!)
I got a welcome email in my inbox this afternoon. ProPresenter 4 has been released and with it a bunch of very excellent features that, in my opinion, keeps this app firmly on the throne as King of Presentation Software.
Even more interesting is Renewed Vision’s announcement that they are working on a Windows port of ProPresenter. I know a lot of PC users who will be happy to hear that.
Here are some FAQs that were included in the email:
WHAT WILL PROPRESENTER 4 WINDOWS LOOK LIKE?
We have put a great deal of thought into the user interface of ProPresenter 4 on the Mac, so why ruin a good thing? We are building the Windows version to look and function identically. If you know how to run ProPresenter 4 Mac, you will know instantly how to run ProPresenter 4 Windows.
WILL IT HAVE ALL THE FEATURES OF THE MAC VERSION?
We are working hard to make sure that every feature of the Mac version is implemented in Windows. In some cases, a feature may be less robust on the Windows platform while others may work even better. Some technical realities beyond the scope of ProPresenter may have an impact (video codecs, shared storage, etc.), but we’re going to make sure these are minimal.
WILL I BE ABLE TO USE BOTH IN MY ORGANIZATION?
From the ground up, we have worked to ensure interoperability between ProPresenter 4 Mac and ProPresenter 4 Windows. This means you will be able to move files back and forth, and they will run largely the same way on either platform.
WHAT ABOUT THE ADVANCED AND ALPHA KEYER MODULES, OR THE PROPRESENTER REMOTE FOR IPHONE?
We’re not planning our initial release of ProPresenter 4 Windows to include any modules or iPhone remote functionality. Depending on market acceptance and customer demand, however, we may consider developing them in the future. Be sure to let us know your interest in these additional features.
WHAT IS THE PRICING OF PROPRESENTER FOR WINDOWS?
ProPresenter for Windows has the same pricing structure as its Mac counterpart. Single user licenses will be platform specific and sold for $399. However, a Site License for ProPresenter 4 will work on either platform, allowing unlimited use on any platform for a single campus, making our site license an even better value add. This means for a $799 site license purchase, you can run ProPresenter 4 on either a Mac or a Windows machine. Existing ProPresenter 4 site license owners will be able to download and unlock the Windows version immediately after it becomes available.
WHY ARE WE ANNOUNCING IT NOW?
Because site licenses of ProPresenter 4 will work on both the Mac and Windows versions, we want people to know these benefits before placing their upgrade orders.
WHEN WILL PROPRESENTER 4 WINDOWS BE RELEASED?
We don’t have a specific date for release quite yet, but are working towards Summer 2010. We will certainly have a public beta test for registered ProPresenter users prior to the wide release. Stay tuned to this page for such an announcement in the coming months.
WILL PROPRESENTER 4 WINDOWS EFFECT THE MAC DEVELOPMENT CYCLE?
Above all else, we want to create the most functional products possible. While ProPresenter 4 has a great many features that we’ve been thinking about for years, we still have a great many more ideas we are looking forward to implementing in the future. Because we have completely separate development teams working on the Mac and Windows versions of ProPresenter, we can concentrate on making each platform’s product the very best it can be and developing new features quickly.
Roll Your Own Digital Signage with an AppleTV: Assembling the Pieces
In my last post about creating your own digital signage solution with an AppleTV, I told you how I prepared my device. In this post I’ll introduce the pieces and talk about how I pieced them together. This post will likely be the last in this series, but I want to encourage anybody who is working on their own solution to build upon what I have here and share with the rest of the community. Digital Signange systems are mad expensive and the majority of churches won’t be able to afford one. But maybe if we work together we can get something built that is far better than what I have here. I’ll talk more about how this system can be improved at the end of the post. Let’s get started!
The Pieces:
- SlideShow Pro
SlideShow Pro is a Flash extension and customizeable SWF that, in short, allows you to create ultra slick, XML driven slideshows. SSP also includes support for video. When I came up with the idea to smash a digital signage solution together, this is the first component I thought of. It’s great and cheap at $39! - SlideShow Director
SlideShow Director is a web app installed on your server (though hosting is available for a fee) and in this case acts as a slick back end to manage the media displayed on your sign. It’s really a fantastic app. With it you will be able to upload content (images and video), create new albums, activate, deactivate and resort media, set hold times for your still images and with a very recent update you can even schedule when certain media items appear! Definately worth the $39. - Weather Widget
For the weather widget, I found this SWF at FlashDen. I spent a little time stripping it down to just the weather icon and tempature and then was easily able to set it to our local weather. - Clock Widget
For the clock I opted to go with a digital display as it was easier to read from a distance. This SWF, also at FlashDen, was perfect! I can customize it to a degree and it also just works and looks pretty neat as well. The inclusion of this clock is why we had to adjust the AppleTV’s internal clock. Otherwise the clock might be a few hours off.
I should note, also, that the above widgets will use the system font available on the AppleTV so if you are hoping to use a different font to display the time and tempature, you’ll need to set those fonts in Flash and then make sure the font is embeded in the Flash. - RSS Ticker
The RSS ticker at the bottom of the sign pulls in a feed from our church calendar but you can have it pull in headlines from anywhere. You might consider setting up a specific feed for the ticker so that you can give more specific information in the headlines since nobody will be clicking on them. To get this done I used the Javascript script found here.
Put it all together:
Finally, I put all the pieces together in a HTML web page. The page I built is a simple, 2-column layout with a footer. I had to do some finagling with the widths and heights to get things looking right on the specific monitor I was using so if you use the file I have as a starting point, you’ll want to tweak it as necessary.
Once the page is built, just drop in your SWFs and the RSS script and you’re good to go.
Put it on the big screen:
To put your signage on your screen, just browse to the web page that you created in the browser on the AppleTV. You might want to bookmark it for easy access later. Also, you will need to refresh the page anytime a change is made to your media rotation is SlideShow Director.
Things that could improve:
To close, I want to aknowledge some shortcomings of the current set-up that I have and put the call out for help improving on what I have done so far so that the community can share:
- Video performance is poor.
Video performance on this thing is sad. You might expect differently from something made for video, but I suspect this has something to do with running the video through Flash which may not take advantage of all the resources of the AppleTV’s hardware.
I’ve tried messed around with different ways of compressing the video and, short of making the actual video dimensions smaller, had little luck getting any performance boost. Performance is not so horrible that a simple animation won’t play. But for 30fps video, forget it.
I imagine that getting better video performance would take some serious hacking. One solution might be to run this setup on a MacMini. I have not tried it yet, but I would think performance would be much better. A MacMini based solution would also negate all the jailbreaking stuff we had to do at the start. Unfortunately it would come at a higher hardware cost. - Does not scale instantly based on screen size.
This system would be much cooler if it could detect the display size that it was set up to and automatically scale appropriately. I’m not versed enough in Javascript or similar technologies, but it seems like this could be done. - Still comes at a cost.
In addition to the cost of the AppleTV, the pieces of this signage puzzle still come at a cost. Granted that cost is under $150, but it sure would be nice if the church community had a one-box solution that handled the media management, ticker and additional widgets. It might not be as slick, but imagine being able to download an installer onto a USB drive, plugging it into the back of your AppleTV and then having it set all this up for you in an instant. That’s be sweet!
Well, that’s all I got! I hope the information in these posts was useful. I’ve included a link to the HTML page I used to piece everything together. You’ll have to purchase the other components yourself.
If you are interested in helping me carry this project further, please get in touch! I’d love to partner with some people who are more skilled than I in these sorts of areas. You can reach me at eric [at] ericgranata [dot] com.
Roll Your Own Digital Signage with an AppleTV: Preparing Your Device
Now I continue on with building a digital signage solution with an AppleTV. There seems to be some interest in the project. Thanks to those who commented on the intro post.
In this post I will discuss the steps taken to prepare the AppleTV for the rest of the abuse that we’ll put it through. It took me forever to complete the steps below due to a bit of trial and error, locating hard to find software, and working on a project involving the type of tinkering that I had not done before. Let’s get started:
Unlock your AppleTV’s potential
The first thing you’ll need to do is jailbreak your AppleTV. There are a lot of ways to do this. But unless you’ve done it before, you will find it worth your time and money to use the handy software provided at atvflash.com($50). Using this software, you’ll skip ahead quite a bit by not only jailbreaking your device in a super simple way, but you’ll avoid the hassle of having to install the Webkit web browser on your device. This app will do it for you.- Enable Flash (get a headache)
This part gave me the most trouble but it would have been a sinch if I was certain I was using the right tools. You need to enable Flash Player on the AppleTV. If you are using ATV Flash, then all you need to do is find the ChoreAudioKit.framework from a Mac OSX 10.4.10 (intel) installation, and upload it to your AppleTV using an FTP client or Terminal. Then run the Install Flash utility found in your AppleTV’s maintinence menu. Boom! Now when browsing the internet on your AppleTV, Flash will work instead of showing you a blue Lego with a question mark. Like I said, this was hard for me because I thought I had the right version of ChoreAudioKit.framework so when it did not work, I destroyed my brain trying to figure out what was going wrong. Finally I double checked my version of the framework and realized my mistake. It MUST be from OSX 10.4.10 (intel). Has to be the version for the Intel processors and has to be the dot-ten version. Dot-ten is not the same as dot-one! Less (but still) vague instructions on this step are found here. Let me know if you have any trouble with this step. - Set the system clock
For reasons that will become clear in a later post, it is important for you to make sure your AppleTV’s system clock is set to your local time zone. I don’t remember what the time zone was set to when I got to this step in my own work. But it was not US Central Standard, so I had to change it. At this point you will need to launch the Terminal app on your Mac and then login via SSH to your AppleTV (your Mac and AppleTV should be on the same network). You should then follow the instructions found here. To many of you, this might make sense. For me, this was the first time I really used Terminal for anything so I was a little intimidated, but it all worked out pretty easily.
That’s it! Your AppleTV already does some pretty sweet tricks what with Flash enabled internet browsing and Boxee on it! Good times.
Have fun playing with its new features while I get together the next post where I introduce more pieces to the puzzle and then begin to piece it all together.
Roll Your Own Digital Signage with an AppleTV: Intro
A while ago, I was charged with the task of looking into AppleTV’s usefullness as a digital signage solution. I knew what I wanted. I wanted the signs to be able to be updated offsite. I wanted to be able to browse to a website, login, upload images and edit their display order. It’d be cool if I could add a ticker at the bottom to pull headlines from our church’s website and maybe a clock and weather widget.
Well, I’ve accomplished this for the most part through the smashing together of a few off the shelf tools. Total cost for this project (minus the TV) was less than $400. Does it do everything? No. But it works, and it was fun. And maybe, with your help, it can be better.
Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be blogging about the steps I took to get to where this project is today, talking about ways it might be better, and ultimately putting the call out for some of you guys who are far smarter than I am to help make this a solution that any church can use with little effort or cost.
Stay tuned.
Showcase | Prezi.com
Prezi is a mind-popping cool, web/Flash based presentation application. Check out the showcase above to see it in action. It’s got this stream of concious thing going that would make any presentation more interesting.
Could be a wicked cool replacement for PowerPoint during your sermons.
Review: ProPresenter Remote
A few weeks ago Renewed Vision released ProPresenter Remote via the iTunes App Store. ProPresenter is a robust song and media presentation app for the Mac. ProPresenter Remote is a companion application that runs on your iPhone or iPod Touch and allows you to view and control the presentation without having to be in front of the computer running ProPresenter. This review gives an overview of the app, feature’s I’d like to see and how your church can use it.
After downloading ProPresenter Remote ($5 from the iTunes App Store) you will need to make sure that your installation of ProPresenter on your Mac is the most recent version (3.5.1 was released along with ProPresenter Remote to add support for the app). Setting up your host computer and the Remote app is a simple process. A couple of clicks in the preferences window on the host computer and a wireless network connection will get you running in a snap.
When you launch ProPresenter Remote you are presented with a list of host computers to connect to. The host computer must be running ProPresenter for it to show up in the list. You are then asked for a password. There are two options for the password and, depending on which password you enter, you will connect as an observer or the controller. Both of these passwords can be set in the preferences window of ProPresenter on the host computer. The two functions of the remote are self explanatory. The observer is allowed to view the song library, song playlists and scripture playlists. The controller interface looks the same, but in addition to observing, a tap on a song slide or scripture slide will present those slides live on the screens. A shake of the iPhone or iPod Touch will give you options to clear the text, background or both as well as an option to clear currently playing audio.
One glaring feature that is missing is the ability to change slide backgrounds remotely. I understand having to generate and load thumbnails for all the backgrounds in a library could take some time but if there was a special playlist on the host application where I could define a small amount of backgrounds to be able to choose from remotely, I would be content.
Another role I would love to fill with this app is that of the confidence monitor. My church in particular does not have a confidence monitor where the lyrics on the audience’s screens are mirrored for the worship leaders to see. The app fulfills some of this role with the observe mode by highlighting the currently displayed slide. However, the Remote app does not automatically move from song to song, it requires a tap on the next button. A solution I imagine working well would work like so:
- Worship leader places iPod Touch on his music stand or podium in landscape orientation.
- The screen adjusts to display the current, live slide (sans background) with white text on black.
- The slide changes as the song progresses.
In addition to a feature like the above, an option to view white text on black in observe mode would be handy as well as options to resize the text for even easier viewing.
In conclusion, this app can be useful for three types of people in your worship service:
- The worship team
Those on stage can use this app as a sort of confidence monitor now. If Renewed Vision ads a feature like I mentioned then it will work even better for this. The worship leader can also use this app to change the slides himself if there is no one else in the tech booth running the show, however he won’t be able to change the background. He’ll also have to take care not to shake the device to much for rick of clearing the screen. - The tech team
If your volunteer is tired of sitting in the tech booth by himself then this app could allow him some freedom to move about. This might also become handy if he needs to leave the booth to take care of another tech issue. You could also hand the controls over to someone else to act as a second controller in the case that the other controller falls behind for some reason. - The audience
If you have members of your audience who have a hard time seeing the screens, this app may help. You could put something in the bulletin like, “Can’t see the screens? Grab the app and login with this password to see the words on your iPod or iPhone.” Make sure your WiFi network is open or that you provide the password to use it.
