December 22, 2009, 3:54 pm
I just wanted to share a cool new feature I just hacked into Lernid today. The current cut of the feature is still very new, but it works great. I have added slide support.
This is how it works: imagine you are giving a session at the upcoming UBuntu Developer Week or Ubuntu Open Week. The sessions are scheduled in the iCal feed, and in the Description you can add the following to your session:
[SLIDES: http://www.myaddress.com/slides.pdf]
This PDF file contains slides for your presentation.
When it comes time to run your session, you type in [SESSIONSTART] in the IRC channel and all Lernid clients will go and download the PDF file and display the first slide in a small and convenient, and resizable pane within the interface.
The session leader can then change to the next slide by typing the following in the session:
[SLIDE 2]
This will then change the slide and display it for all Lernid clients. This now means that in tutorial sessions we can display presentations to viewers while the session is going on. This is a huge feature for our learning weeks. Also, don’t forget that we also have functionality built into Lernid to display URLs shown in the channel too in the built-in web browser. This is all helping Lernid to become a solid platform for online training.
This is how it looks:
The feature landed in bazaar today, but it will take a little while for me to eek out some of the bugs. As such, don’t expect it to work flawlessly in the daily builds of Lernid. My aim is to have these bugs squashed by the new year.
Rock and roll!
