Appendix A. Impress Tools and Resources

We covered the impress.js presentation development techniques and concepts in the previous chapters. Once you are familiar with creating presentations, there are some online resources to improve your experience on this framework. Covering these tools and applications is beyond the scope of this book, so you can go through these resources online.

Impress presentation tools

In order to create impress presentations, you must at least have knowledge of HTML and CSS. Not everyone who wants to create presentations will be familiar with these technologies, so it's important to find out the possibilities of creating impress presentations without technical knowledge. Luckily, there are some free tools we can use to create presentations with impress.js.

Strut

This is a free tool where you can create slides with basic elements. Although it is not possible to use the full features of impress.js, this will be handy for non-technical people to create quick presentations. You can find this tool available at http://tantaman.github.com/Strut/dist/index.html.

As with most presentation software, slides are displayed as a list in the left-hand side and we can add new slides dynamically. The following screenshot will preview the slide creation screen of this tool:

We can add elements such as text, images, and videos into slides. Advanced features such as CSS styles and events cannot be used yet with this tool. Once we finish the slide creation process, we can go to the overview of the presentation using the Overview button on the right. The Overview screen will be as follows:

Overview is where we position our slides. Just drag the slides or provide custom values for the x, y, z attributes. Once we are done with adjusting the positions, we can click on the Present button to start the presentation and it will run as a normal impress presentation.

Impressionist

Impressionist is another tool to automate the presentation creation process. You can find the demo at http://hsivaram.com/impressionist/0.1/. The only limitation of impressionist compared to strut is that it only works on WebKit browsers, so we will be using the Chrome browser to demonstrate the functionality.

The following is the main slide creation screen of impressionist. It is quite similar to the previous slide creation screen:

Once we are done with all the slides, we can move into the overview of slides using the Orchestration View button on the top-right corner of the screen. There you can position elements like we did earlier. All the controls are given in the menu bar for positioning, rotating, and scaling. The following is the preview of Orchestration View:

We can click on the Preview button to see the presentation in action. These tools are very handy for non-technical users. Feel free to check out these tools and create simplified presentations.

Impressive presentations

We have created various kinds of presentations throughout this book. Now let's see some awesome presentations created by others using impress.js:

• What the Heck is Responsive Web Design by John Polacek at http://johnpolacek.github.com/WhatTheHeckIsResponsiveWebDesign-impressjs/#/title

• 12412.org presentation to Digibury by Stephen Fulljames at http://extra.12412.org/digibury/#/title

• Bonne année 2012 by Edouard Cunibil at http://duael.fr/voeux/2012/#/since-2009

• WordPress 201: Performance and Security by Jason Cosper at http://jasoncosper.com/talks/wcphx/wp201/#/step-1

• The Revolutionary CSS3: a non-technical intro to CSS3 by Scott Cheng at http://scottcheng.github.com/revolutionary-css3/#/title

impress.js demos from the book

We created sample applications to explain each concept and technique in impress.js in this book. Here you can find the online resources for accessing these demos.

A complete list of all the demos from the book can be found at the following link:

http://innovativephp.com/demo/impress-js-demos/

Full source code of the examples in this book can be downloaded from the following link:

http://innovativephp.com/demo/impress-js-demos.zip