[REBOL] Re: facts we will have to face ...
From: greggirwin:mindspring at: 26-Oct-2001 12:20
Hi Robert, et al
<< > Do you consider presentations to be a business application?
Hi, no. It's a tool for communication it's not a business application you
earn money with (only consultants like me do this ;-)). You use it to talk
about
a business application. >>
I won't dive into the "what is a business application" side of the
conversation here beyond saying I agree with Joel on this one. The key
phrase, though, in your response is "It's a tool for communication". That's
*exactly* right.
Right now we're talking about a business presentation context, but that's
just 'the tip of the tip of the iceberg' (I use that phrase a lot when
telling people about REBOL to point out how far we have still to go to
exploit its capabilities) and an isolated example.
REBOL is a messaging language first and foremost. Most of us on the list
seem to be using it to play around in areas we're familiar with and haven't
even touched the messaging side of things, not far beyond basic remote
access and e-mail. Maarten is pushing things with remote service invocation,
which is targeted at developers like us and is for messaging at the program
level.
When you said "It's a tool for communication" I interpret it to mean
communication between humans, not programs and machines. This is where REBOL
should *really* shine. Cybarite has done a nice VID sample called EV-Pres
which uses EasyVID as its basis. Jeff has also done a little
animation/presentation engine. Then there's Oldes' slide show sample. With
these, and looking at IOS' Presenter reblet screen-shot, it should be clear
that you *could* build a presentation app to compete with PowerPoint. Most
people only want/need/use probably 1% of the functionality in the current MS
Office apps. But I digress...
REBOL's real power will shine when we think in terms of communication apps
that let specialists use the nomenclature of their repsective fields and we
exchange messages that are readable both by humans and by REBOL.
PowerPoint is a great example of what works in the context of a controlled
environment not working outside of a controlled environment. It's a closed
format and not easily distributed. People send me PPS files and I can't view
them and I'm running W2K! My wife can't run them on her iMac, and they take
*forever* to download. If I can't see the data, the communcation link has
failed utterly.
What other kinds of presentations could there be, besides marketing, you
ask? Well, how about animated algorihtms for CS classes, or a project status
presentation that shows you the gantt chart and you watch as the individual
timelines animate to show the progress of each item? What about adapting the
concept of Literate Programming to this area? Literate Presentations would
let you write your research report on opthamology as a regular report but it
could also be used to drive your presentation of the subject matter.
Sorry to ramble on here but I'm just about jumping out of my chair thinking
about the possibilities. Maybe because I had such a hard time getting
PowerPoint to work for me when I did presentations and they said I *had* to
use it. Switching between the machined running PP and the machine running my
example code was a pain. Inevitably you'd forget once or twice and the
audience would have to yell "SWITCH THE SCREEN!" because they couldn't see
the code you were typing. What we need is a "presentation IDE" for REBOL. :)
--Gregg