Living Open Source» software

Running PowerPoint (and everything else) with your iPhone

Tim — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:11:31 +0000

Instead of throwing something at the guy working your projector when you need to change PowerPoint slides, you could use your iPhone or your iPod touch as your remote. With a swipe of your thumb, your next slide appears majestically on the screen. And what if you also had a view of your slide and its associated notes in your palm too?

Even if nobody got what you were trying to say, they would at least be in awe of your wizardry.

There are three iPhone Apps that can help you achieve this. All of these rely on a wireless network to connect your iPhone to your computer. Each also needs their own program installed on the computer to make the link. If you don’t have access to a network in the place you will give the presentation, then you can create an Ad-Hoc computer-iPhone network and all three apps will work with this.

So now for the Apps…

1. i-Clickr

With i-Clickr you can control your presentation from your iPhone or iPod touch with your thumb and have in front of you a preview of the slide or the notes attached. The best thing about this app is that it now supports OpenOffice as well as PowerPoint.

Using it as your note aid is fine if you have passed the vision test for astronauts, but it is a good attempt. This is probably the simplest to use of the three, but then it only controls your presentation. It is also far from perfect – room for improvement or for somebody to better it. The other Apps below also let you take control of every other app on your PC or MAC.

2. Air Mouse

If you want to control other programs like your media player or your song projection software, then i-Clickr isn’t much help, great though it is. What you need is your mouse and keyboard in the palm of your hand with a few custom shortcuts to favourite key strokes. This is what AirMouse dose and very well.

It works like your trackpad or mouse but also has a mode that uses the iPhone accelerometers to respond to movement. This takes a bit of getting used to, but it tries to turn tour iPhone into a pointing device, not unlike a WII remote. You are able to create custom profiles for your favourite PC or MAC software and so you can tailor it to work the way you want to. This app has far wider application than just presentations.

3. Hippo Remote Pro

Like AirMouse, HippoRemotePro turns your iPhone into a wireless trackpad and keyboard. Like with airMouse you can have different profiles for each of the programs you want to control and all works fine. It also throws in some other so-called social networking bits that seem to make it all just a bit too complicated. It works well, but I just think AirMouse is the slicker option.

Conclusion

If all you need to do is run PowerPoint or OpenOffice Impress, then i-Clickr is all you need. But you might as well have AirMouse too, you will find an infinite number of uses for it.

Open Source Software:– Storyboard your next AV with Celtx?

Tim — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 09:38:23 +0000

Celtx aims to be a fully integrated solution for media pre-production and collaboration. If you have an idea for a story, movie or play then Celtx is designed to help you develop ideas of plot, scene and characters. You can use it to storyboard a project and collaborate with others too. It can help you organise a project, gathering images, sounds, clips into one place to work into an idea. There is also the Celtx Project Central site which allows Celtx users to access an on-line community where collaboration and sharing of work is possible.

I really like this concept and the software seems pretty cool, but you may wonder what it has to offer churches given that this is a series on Open Source software for church use! Well, clearly if you are into producing your own drama scripts or audio-visuals then this may help bring some organisation to your work. You might even find this tool works well for working on services and even sermons! It would also be interesting to explore the collaboration aspects. There have been a number of examples of collaborative, open source films and other media productions recently. Celtx’s own Project Central aims to encourage such work. It would be great to see a bunch of Christians put their heads together to produce some amazing media projects.

In fact I did find a couple (and only a couple!) of embryonic Christian projects on Project Central that seem to head in that kind of direction. For example, I found this project that is for producing a series of DVDs introducing the Christian faith for young people. It doesn’t look like the project came to anything as it is unfinished, but is a good example of the kind of thing that Celtx is intended for.

So, is anybody up for working on an Open Source Alpha or a series of alternative parable scripts or some new life changing youth teaching materials?

Open Source Software:– GIMP (Image editing for free)

Tim — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 08:57:25 +0000

GIMP is a powerful image manipulation tool. Version 2.4 has just been released and having used this for a while, thought it was worth a mention here. GIMP is a free and open source alternative to Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro and is used for photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It supports all the usual file formats and in case you were wondering, GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program.

Put GIMP alongside InkScape, the open source vector drawing tool, and you have quite a powerful set of design tools.

GIMP can be compiled for various platforms, but a Windows installer is maintained on a separate site.

Download the Windows version

Get some help with these books on GIMP

Open Source Software:– A big bucket of free software!

Tim — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 10:34:27 +0000

The Google Pack is a collection of software programs, some of which are Open Source and all of which are completely free. Included in the pack are at least 13 applications. Some of them you may already have, such as Firefox and the Real music player. But it is worth downloading this pack for the following reasons alone:

Picasa – This is one really cool tool for managing your photos. If they charged for this you would still buy it!

StarOffice – A derivative of the OpenOffice suite. You really don’t need to buy Ms Office, it has replacements for Word, PowerPoint and Access. Why do people call their data projector “PowerPoint”. We use Impress and it runs all those PowerPoint files you get sent.

Skype – use your computer and internet connection to communicate with anyone, anywhere in the world.

Spyware Doctor Starter Edition – Detects and removes spyware, adware, trojans and keyloggers.

Open Source Software:– Publishing Software

Tim — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 08:37:42 +0000

I thought I’d exhausted my list of useful open source (or at least free) software that churches might be interested in. Then I came across Scribus – a desktop publishing application that is a great alternative to Microsoft Publisher.

Scribus is an open-source program that gives you page layout tools for Linux/Unix, MacOS X and Windows. It has a fairly user friendly interface and supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and even PDF creation.

The install may not be as straightforward for some, as you do need to install Ghostscript for Scribus to work. But it is well worth it. Notes for installation for Windows users can be found here.

I must admit I have been trying to ween myself off Microsoft Office for some time in favour of OpenOffice, but the one feature that demanded that Office remain on my PC was for DTP. How else can you create flyers and posters? With Scribus it looks like I might finally be able to go to Add/Remove programs and select MS Office.

Open Source Software:– Inkscape

Tim — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 07:51:57 +0000

Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor. It aims to become a powerful graphic tool like Adobe Illustrator or Freehand. OK, so it does not have everything that these tools have, but then it doesn’t have a price tag either!

Inkscape is a vector graphics program which uses the open source SVG format. It can be used for drawing illustrations for the church web site, newsheets, logos etc. Check out the Inscape galleires to get some idea what can be achieved with this tool.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an open, industry-standard XML-based format for vector graphics developed by the W3C. Its acceptance is growing fast. Most vector editors these days can import and export SVG, and modern browsers (such as Firefox and Opera) can display it directly.

Inkscape runs on Linux, Windows 2000/2003/XP, and OSX. Download it here. There is also an online book on Inkscape to get you started.

Open Source Software:– No More PowerPoint

Tim — Thu, 10 May 2007 08:13:47 +0000

When you buy a new PC, you always forget to include another £200-£300 for a version of Microsoft Office, which these days doubles the price of a new PC. Church people irritatingly call those projector things “PowerPoint”, brainwashed with the Microsoft way and willingly hand over bundles of cash for Office. But there is another way!

Open Office has been around a while, but it continues to mature and develop. It is open source, free and can handle all your Office documents in their native format. Most of the bundled applications work in very similar ways to Office. There is Writer (looks like Word), Impress (time to drop the Powerpoint), Calc (works like Excel), Base (almost as good as Access) and Draw (actually Office doesn’t have an equivalent for this one).

As pointed out by the JediMoose on the last post in this series, OpenOffice can also export PDF files.

Many organisations, businesses and government bodies are using OpenOffice as their standard desktop office suite. So stop calling your data projector PowerPoint, save some money, download OpenOffice and start Impressing people instead.

You can also download an information flyer for Open Office.

Open Source Software:– Create PDF files

Tim — Tue, 01 May 2007 15:52:52 +0000

The Adobe Reader PDF format has become the de facto standard for electronic document distribution and publication. Everybody has Adobe installed, even if they didn’t realise what it was or where it came from. So if you want to publish your cell or home group notes on the web, PDF has to be the obvious choice.
Whatever you do though, don’t just upload your Word documents.

But how do you create PDF files? More importantly how do you take an existing document in Word (or any application) and convert it to a pdf file? And how do you do it without shelling out some cash?

Here are three tools that do the job in a similar way. You download them and once installed you find yourself with a new Printer on your system. When you select that printer from any application and print a document, these clever little tools turn your document into a pdf file.

PrimoPDF – works well, allows you to secure pdf files and has a really easy interface. It is not Open Source, but is free (GNU).
PDF Creator – works well, can create other types of document and it is Open Source. But the user interface is much more confusing than PrimoPDF.
doPDF – easy to use, but less features than other two.

All because this morning the pdf creator I actually purchased a couple of years back has stopped working! You’ll find it in the skip.

Open Source Software:– WordPress

Tim — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 16:06:17 +0000

Continuing my list of freebie software for churches, this one is a little obvious to anyone who has visited my blog before. WordPress is the software which drives this blog and is also used to run our church website. There are now a growing number of WordPress-Driven Churches all using WordPress to run their website.

By installing WordPress on your domain you can run a website or blog without worrying about technicalities.

WordPress was designed as a blogging tool. “Blog” is an abbreviated version of “weblog,” and refers to web sites that maintain an ongoing chronicle of information. A bit like an online journal. It is Open Source, has a huge community of users and of course is free. It is becoming a popular solution for churches, because it lowers the geek barrier – you don’t need to do HTML, CSS or any of the techie stuff to run your site. You simply focus on content.

It is also so much more than a blogging tool. Static pages and hundreds of great plugins mean WordPress can be used in many other applications. Some of the reasons why it is ideal for church websites are:

It is FREE!
The blog format encourages a church’s story to be told. In fact your website comes to life when you start using WordPress.
The interface is much simpler than other content management tools.
The format encourages community.
There are literally thousands of great design templates available to download, including some designed specifically for churches.

To run WordPress yourself, you need your own domain, but there is also WordPress.com where you can setup a blog without the need to install software or run your own domain name (though that really isn’t all that hard). WordPress.com is a good place to start if you want to have a play with this great tool.

You can install WordPress in 5 minutes. Honest! Heres how…

Open Source Software:– Song Projection

Tim — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 14:56:07 +0000

There are literally hundreds of song projection programs designed to project song lyrics and control your data projection in church. Most of them are actually pretty poor, with terrible user interfaces and what is more – they cost the earth. At one point I began writing my own, a project still lying incomplete, but then a number of FREE packages began to emerge, some of which are truly open source.

There is absolutely no reason why you should pay 300GBP for software like SongPro to do this. Here are five open source/free candidates that do the job well.

The one I think stands out, above all these is EasiSlides, and is my personal favourite at present. The only thing I have to concede is that it isn’t strictly Open Source, but it is FREE.

Also, if you want to use PowerPoint resources, you don’t need Microsoft Office. Use OpenOffice instead – its free!

Found any others? What do you use in church?