Podium
A markup-based slide presentation tool.
Why?
Developers go to conferences. And when they do, they need slide decks.
Unfortunately, while presentation tools like Keynote and PowerPoint are great for business presentations, they aren't well suited to the needs of developers. The mainstay of developer presentations -- code samples -- are generally painful to add to a Keynote presentation.
These presentation tools also come from a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tradition. This can be powerful, because it makes it easy to put anything you want onto a slide. But it can also be painful, because you end up spending all your time pushing pixels into the right place, instead of focussing on the content of your talk. And if you want to make a style change, you may need to apply that change manually to every slide. The lessons of separating content from markup can't be applied to a WYSIWYG world.
On top of all that, the document formats for Keynote and Powerpoint are binary blobs -- they don't lend themselves to version control, collaborative editing, and so on.
The developer response to this has been to use HTML5. Recent years have seen the development of a number of HTML-based presentation tools, like prezi, deck.js, keydown and showoff. These tools exploit the power of HTML5 to make full screen presentations.
However, by using browser technology as the basis for these tools, they miss one very important feature of WYSIWYG presentation tools: presenter mode. One of the big features of Keynote and Powerpoint is that they aren't just decks of slides -- they have presenter notes and timing tools, and the display shown to the audience isn't the same as the display shown to the presenter. Web-based presentation tools are often missing presenter mode.
Or, if they do have a presenter mode, they rely on you being able to independently resize two separate web browsers, and they won't provide any assistance in hiding all the browser toolbars, menus, titlebars, and so on. This can be done, but it's awkward.
Many of these tools are also online-only. They assume that you have a good WiFi connection, and will be able to display your content live off the internet... which if you've ever been to a developer conference, you'll know is a risky proposition.
Podium attempts to bridge the gap between these two poles. It is comprised of:
- A simple, text-based markup format, focussed on the needs of developer presentations.
- A graphical presentation tool that has a presenter display independent of the slide display.
Quickstart
Official releases of Podium can be downloaded from the GitHub releases page.
Download the binary for your platform of choice, and run it. This should open a
file dialog, prompting you to open a .podium slide deck. An example Podium
slide deck is also available in the releases folder. Unzip the deck, and open
it in Podium.
Note
The Linux AppImage format is a cross-platform binary that should run on any Linux distribution using GLibC 2.23 or later - this includes Ubuntu 16.04 and later, Fedora 24 and later, and others.
After downloading the AppImage, you may need to mark the AppImage file as
executable (chmod +x Podium-*.AppImage) first. In Linux, .podium
files appear as directories; select the directory and click Open.
Controls from here are keyboard based:
- CMD-P - Enter presentation mode; or, if in presentation mode, Pause timer
- Esc - Exit presentation mode
- CMD-Tab - Switch displays
- Right/Left arrows - Next/previous slide
- Down/Up arrows - Next/previous slide
- Enter - Next slide
- Home/End - first/last slide
- CMD-A - Switch aspect ratio between 16:9 and 4:3
- CMD-R - Reload slide deck
- CMD-T - Reset timer
If you're on Linux, "CMD" is the Control key.
Developing Podium
Podium uses the BeeWare suite of tools and libraries - most notably, the Toga widget toolkit, and the Briefcase packaging tool.
To develop Podium, create a virtual environment, and install the BeeWare tools.
If you're using Linux, you'll need to install some system packages first:
# Ubuntu/Debian $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install python3-dev libgirepository1.0-dev libcairo2-dev libpango1.0-dev libwebkit2gtk-4.0-37 gir1.2-webkit2-4.0 # Fedora $ sudo dnf install pkg-config python3-devel gobject-introspection-devel cairo-devel cairo-gobject-devel pango-devel webkitgtk3
Then, you can create a virtual environment and install the BeeWare tools:
$ mkdir beeware $ cd beeware $ python3 -m venv venv $ source venv/bin/activate (venv) $ pip install --pre beeware
Now that you have the code, you can clone the Podium repository and run it in developer mode:
(venv) $ git clone https://github.com/beeware/podium.git (venv) $ cd podium (venv) $ briefcase dev
This should open the same file dialog as before.
Packaging with Briefcase
Use Briefcase to package this repository as a standalone application:
$ briefcase package
Depending on your platform, this will produce a macOS folder containing
a Podium DMG file, or a linux folder containing a .AppImage file.
Note
Packaging cross-distribution Linux binaries is a complex process; See the notes on AppImage packaging in the Briefcase documentation for more details.
Overriding Default themes
Define a style.css file to override the default theme. You can use the Debugging section to help you create a theme that suites your style.
Debugging
If you need to debug the CSS for a slide, you may want to use the "inspect element" feature of the webview. You may need to enable manually enable the feature at an operating system level:
macOS: at a terminal prompt, run:
defaults write org.beeware.podium WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true
Documentation
Documentation for Podium can be found on Read The Docs.
Community
Podium is part of the BeeWare suite. You can talk to the community through:
We foster a welcoming and respectful community as described in our BeeWare Community Code of Conduct.
Contributing
If you experience problems with Podium, log them on GitHub. If you want to contribute code, please fork the code and submit a pull request.