Flip is a very simple presentation tool. I built it for myself after having enough of bloated software such as Keynote or Powerpoint, not to mention presentations that became corrupted. Keynote used to be great, then they had a meeting and ruined it. All I needed was a piece of software that would show slides containing images, video and text.
Flip is not for everyone. There's no presenter's notes. There's no multiscreen support. There's no chart making or anything like that. It's also not meant for lots of text. If you like those things in a presentation then continue using Keynote et al. Flip is not for you. What it does do however is remove the need for laying things out such as text, images, video etc, plus it doesn't store your stuff in any kind of proprietary format - your files all live outside of Flip.
Flip also automatically resizes to whatever the screen / projector resolution is. Many venues now have different projector sizes which means normally you need to know before making your presentation the format of the projector. Not a problem with Flip.
It's also very much a work-in-progress; far from perfect but hopefully it's something to build on.
I've used Flip in presentations at various conferences and it's worked perfectly – even had one AV guy say it was the best presentation software he'd ever seen!
Flip is a viewer rather than an editor, meaning that there is no editing or slide construction within Flip itself. All slides are constructed as folders in the same directory as the exported Flip application. Each folder may contain a text file, video files or multiple images.
The code in this repo is for Processing. To use Flip simply export an application by choosing File > Export Application and choose the fullscreen option. This will export an application for your operating system. Simply put the exported app in the folder containing your 'slides', add the settings.json file and you're good to go.
Flip requires the settings.json file to be present in the same directory as the Flip application. You can use this json file to set the presentation title, the typeface, the background colour of the presentation, the background colour of the slides and the number of columns you wish to use for the grid.
When first started Flip will be in intro mode - think of this as a pretty animation of your presentation that you can use to talk over, do an intro, a little dance or whatever. Press "i" to toggle between intro mode and grid mode.
Press "0" to start the presentation.
Use the left and right arrow keys to navigate.
At any time you can zoom out by pressing "f". Press "f" again to zoom back in.
SPACE BAR will play any video.
SHIFT will fade any text on screen.
Press "r" to reload the slides.
Flip comes with example folders (slides) to show how you can display text, images or video.
To show text you create a text file with the extension txt. It doesn't matter what you call it as long as it has this extension. Each line of text in the text file will be rendered on the slide, but be aware there is no text wrapping so any text that is longer than the screen will be cut off or bleed onto the next slide.
Text is always rendered at the same default size.
Files with the extensions png and jpeg are supported. Images larger than the screen size will be automatically scaled down to fit, whilst images smaller will be centered. You can have many images per slide - just use the up / down arrow keys to navigate multiple images. Any text shown over the first image will fade away when you start to use these keys.
Files with the extension mov, m4v, mpeg, mpg and mp4 are supported. To show video correctly you must have an image with the dimensions you wish to show the video at - anything larger than the screen will be scaled down to fit. The corresponding video file must be named the same as your image but with the relevant extension. For example the actual movie file for movie.png would be movie.png.mov When you press the SPACEBAR the video will play. Press SPACEBAR again to stop. When the video is playing you can drag with the mouse left or right to jump to a certain point in the video. Any text over the video will fade away when playing. The background will also change to black when the video plays.
You can quickly put an outline for a presentation together just by making a series of empty folders. Flip will use the name of the folder as draft text for the slide.
Putting an underscore in front of the folder name will hide that folder from the presentation. This means you can hide rather than delete slides, in case you want to use them later.
Press 't' (for test) and handy circles will appear at each corner in red, green, blue and black. This is handy to check slides aren't being cut off by the projector, the keystone alignment as well as testing colour balance.
Easter egg - if you add an image called "testcard.png" and an audio file called "audio.mp3" into the main folder the image will appear and the audio will play when pressing 't'. This is really handy for testing audio and image quality during set up especially when the AV guy says "can you play some audio". I use cheesey lounge music but that's entirely optional.
Flip comes with support for Touch OSC so you can use an iPhone to control the presentation as long as you're on the same WiFi network.
More info about Touch OSC at http://hexler.net/software/touchosc
The video poster image creation is not ideal and needs to be automated in some way.
Think it could also benefit from some kind of multiple text ability for building text points on a slide.
Multiple screen support with presenter notes would be great.
Fork this repo, make it better and do a pull request. Would love to see people improve on it.