Wimpy Point: The Manual

Contents

WimpyPoint: The Basic Idea

WimpyPoint is a replacement for desktop bloatware such as Microsoft PowerPoint. You can build a slide presentation in WimpyPoint from any Web browser anywhere in the world. WimpyPoint will hold onto your presentation in a professional maintained and backed up relational database management system (Oracle 8). You can forget your laptop. You can drop your laptop. You will still be able to give your presentation anywhere in the world that you can find a Web browser.

More interestingly, WimpyPoint lets you work with colleagues. From your desk at MIT, you can authorize a friend at Stanford to edit your presentation, the two of you can work together until you're satisfied, and then you can both go into a conference room at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories and give your talk from our server. For more information on setting up access you can go here

(Naturally this assumes that our machine is up and running and the various Internet backbones are operating properly. We strive for maximum reliability but nobody can achieve 100% uptime for any Internet service. If your career absolutely positively depends on a presentation, we recommend using the Print button on your Web browser to make a hardcopy of your slides.
Back to the top

Some Basic WimpyPoint Concepts

Collaboration

We don't want to let people edit other people's presentations willy-nilly (lest you walk into an important meeting only to find your work replaced by a dirty picture), but we certainly want to let users work with other collaboratively (that's the whole point, right?). WimpyPoint allows authors to specify exactly who is allowed to view and work on their presentations (for more info, check out the help screens later once you've started working on your own presentation). The details for setting up collaboration are in the Access controls section.

Styles

Black on white with red/blue/purple links and a 12-point serif font looks OK, but it gets boring after a while (and may not suit some people's needs). For this reason, we let you select styles to use when viewing presentations. (You can change the style used to view a presentation by clicking the Change Style link in the lower-right corner on a presentation's table of contents.) Styles can change pages' background and color scheme, and even more if you know how to write CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) code.

For more details on creating your own styles, you should see the style editing section
Back to the top

WimpyPoint Main Page

From the main screen, WimpyPoint's index page, you can locate a presentation to view or edit. There may be quite a few presentations already in WimpyPoint. You probably don't want to see a list of all of them - the sliders at the top of the screen let you select To show a presentation, click its title. To edit a presentation (assuming that you created it or are a collaborator), click the edit link next to its listing.

You can follow the links under Options to


Back to the top

Creating a New Presentation

From the main page in WimpyPoint, you can create your own presentation. To do this, follow the link for creating a new presentation, and follow the instructions which appear above each of the entry boxes. Once you choose to save the presentation, you will then go on to either creating a new style for the presentation, or directly on to creating slide


Back to the top

Creating Slides

The "Create a Slide" page is used both to create and edit slides. If a slide is being edited, the information from your slides will be filled into the various fields on this page. If you are creating a new slide, all of the fields will be blank.

There are four main portions of a Wimpy Point slide:

If you would like to add an image or other file, you should follow the Upload Attachment link. Otherwise, follow the Save Slide link to either save the changes made to your slide, or to add the new slide to your presentation.

Attaching a file to a slide

If the you choose to add an attachment from the create slide page, you will end up on the slide attachment page. This page allows you to attach images to a slide in your presentation, or upload a file (an "attachment") to be linked from the slide.

The top of the box displays a list of all images and attachments (if any) currently associated with the slide, along with their respective sizes and an indication of where they are displayed (these options correspond to the options in the bottom half of the box).

To add an image or attachment, click the Browse... button and select the file containing the image or attachment. Choose how you want the file displayed (if it's not an image, you'll want to select Display a link the viewer can use to download the file), and click Add the Attachment. Once you do this, you can click Preview the Slide to see how the slide will look.
Back to the top

Editing a Style

On the style editing page, Colors are specified using the usual red/green/blue scheme (familiar to anyone who's used Photoshop or written HTML code). Each component is a number from 0 to 255; the first component is red, the second is green, and the third is blue. If you prefer, you can just select a color from the pull-down menu which is close to the one that you envision, and then try mucking around with the resultant numbers.

You can select any of the images you've uploaded to use as the background for your slides.

For Advanced Users

If you know CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), you can key in (or cut and paste) some CSS code to be linked to your slides. (The colors and background image supplied on the top half of this page are incorporated only as attributes to the <BODY> tag, so any CSS settings you provide will override them for CSS-aware browsers.)
Back to the top

Setting up Presentaton Access Control Lists (ACL)

From a presentation's main page, you can follow a link to choose who has different levels of access to apresentation.

From the access control page, users can be granted one of three levels of access to a presentation:

This page also allows you to grant users permission to view, collaborate on, or own the presentation. It displays a box for each of these privileges (omitting the view-only box if the presentation is public). To invite a person to view, collaborate on, or own the presentation, click the Add One button in one of the boxes. (Note that you can even add a person who hasn't registered with this community system.) You'll have the option to send the person whom you invite an E-mail containing a link which he or she can use to go directly to the presentation.
Back to the top

Version Tracking

Freezing

From the main page for a presentation, you can choose to "freeze a set of slides". Wimpy point allows you to have as many versions of a set of slides as you desire. Every time you "freeze" a presentation, you create a version of that presentation, and all of the slides with it, which can be "restored" at any point in time in the future. This can be used to keep a polished, presentation-ready version of a slide-show, while editing another version. It also works well for having a copy of the slide show which was used for a particular presentation, making it possible to look back and see what versions of the presentation might have been more or less successful. On the actual freeze page, you can enter a line of text to help you remember what the saved version of the presentation is. Pressing the Freeze Presentation button will allow you to return to the main page for the presentation.

Restoring a "frozen" version

Once a presentation has been frozen, a new section will appear on the main page for the presentation, allowing frozen versions of the given presentation to be viewed, viewed with any comments which have been added to the verstion, or to even replace the current version with one of the frozen versions. In any of the three cases, a version must be first be selected by using the presentation's "previous versions" drop-down menu. The version can then be viewed by pressing either of the view buttons; in this case, nothing will happen to the current version. It can also be restored by pushing the "restore previous version" button underneath the drop-down. If this is the case, you will be brought to a screen to confirm your choice. Warning if you restore a frozen version, without freezing your current version, your work may be lost forever. Once you have done this, the restored version of your presentation will take the place of whatever version was current at the time.
Back to the top
Adam Pennington
Last modified: Tue May 30 23:18:56 EDT 2000