Eduard Gamonal

Tomorrow morning I’ll be giving a  lightning talk about Software Engineering, as part of the course Oral English for the Technical Professions.

Find the slides below

download: Software Engineering (879.58KB) added: 04/05/2010 clicks: 864 description: Lightning talk about Software Engineering, as part of the subject Oral English for the Technical Professions. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

Last Saturday I went to uni to attend a few afternoon conferences, organised by FiberParty (ca). There was a talk about graphic design (integrating Inkscape, The Gimp, Scribus and Blender), and another one, very interesting, about Python. I’m sorry I can’t remember the name of the guy who talked, but I remember he used a little app called Impressive (written in Python, of course).

It’s a command line tool to improve our PDF presentations by making them more eye candy. Ow, but you’ve got OpenOffice.org+OpenGL running on a fashionable portable computer with GNU/Linux. I do, too but Impressive is also useful:

I don’t really like laser pointers; I reckon they are too small. This tool has solved it Look below. I’d like to make the audience pay attention to an iPod shown in the picture.

It’s a screenshot of a PDF presentation I run like:

edu@debian:~/Impressive-0.10.2$ ./impressive.py ~/Desktop/mll-aep.pdf

When I reached the slide on the left, I pressed enter and the mouse became a big circle. I press enter again and everything goes back to the previous state.

We can draw a box arround the desired area to highlight it, like that:

[singlepic id="20" w="320" h="" mode="" float="left" ]

Useful, huh? Highlighting code is easier There are more cool features, like an OSD display: run your presentation and press T. You’ll see a little timer to know how long you have been boring your audience. You don’t like having random transition effects? just add the parameter -t:
edu@debian:~/Impressive-0.10.2$ ./impressive.py -t SlideRight ~/Desktop/mll-aep.pdf

And, as usual, type

edu@debian:~/Impressive-0.10.2$ ./impressive.py –help

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