node.js ko
SlideJoin
SlideJoin
by Code Party
SlideJoin is a mobile web app that engages audiences with presentations. Audiences can use their phones to follow along with slides and provide realtime feedback. (Unfortunately, displaying uploaded slides broke at the last minute, but we will fix the bugs after judging!)
Judging Instructions
Please visit slidejoin.com and follow the instructions. The site will demonstrate how SlideJoin works, both as a presenter and as an audience member. You can also try SlideJoin with your own presentation by uploading a PDF of your slides.
Who
How
- Racer for realtime model synchronization
- TypeKit for fonts
- iScroll for mobile fixed pane scrolling
- Moniker for random name generation
- ImageMagick for PDF to image conversion
- jQuery Mobile for DOM updating and events
- Stylus and Nib for CSS styling
- connect-gzip for gzipping
- Express for static file serving and routing
- CoffeeScript for scripting
- Mu for templating
- Joyent for hosting
- GitHub for repository sharing
- TextMate, Vico, and Vim for text editing
- Adobe Photoshop for graphic design
- The usual onslaught of browsers for testing
- Node.js of course!
Votes
Your Vote
Voting is now closed.
Other Votes
(46)
samanthaquistjudge
tiffanykjudgeUseful app. Foreseeing Slideshare-like SlideJoin website extensions or partnerships. Looking forward to other presentation filetypes supported. Lite version of Citrix’s GoToMeeting App, WebEx for iPad, etc., but kudos for solid product in 48 hours!
ChrisCinelli
contestantThis is pretty cool. I agree that skipping ahead may not be a good idea but I like everything else. There are a lot of presentation tools but yours can really compete with what is out there with some extra work. Having just 48h you did an awesome job!
emckeanjudgewow, I think letting the audience skip through the slides is a presenter’s nightmare. It’s hard enough to keep people engaged …
mnshahjudgeAwesome job. I love the utility of it. It gets really hard to follow along presentations especially as audience sizes grow. This is a simple, fast way to keep everyone on the same page.
atsuya
contestantthe best project i found for nko :)
pfinettejudgeThis is really sweet. Great utility in a nice package. Would be really cool to add backchannel (other than polls) to the app.
nateps
contestantWe totally agree. We had a ton of different ideas for other ways to engage the audience with the presentation, such as continuous realtime feedback during the presentation about how the presenter is doing, surveys at the end, contact info sharing, etc.
Thanks for judging! Nate
- pfinettejudge
In case you intend to take this further – make sure to keep me in the loop. Would love to see how Mozilla might be able to help.
ryanmcgrath
judgeI really can’t find anything I’m not impressed about with this.
The design is great (and it looks solid both on Desktop and Mobile, no less), and it’s overall fun to use – it’s fast, too, which I found I greatly appreciated.
I rank this high on innovation, but to be honest going in I wasn’t expecting to do so. You guys built a solid experience that convinced me to think “woah, this is incredibly useful”. Kudos galore.
Given solid design, implementation, and a pretty innovative use case, I’m happy to dole out a 5 on completeness. Rock it.
- contestant
Thank you so much! We plan to fix the bugs and keep the service running after judging, so check back if you would be interested in using it for your own presentations!
Thanks again! Nate
mstinaleejudgeLOVE this! So useful! Would totally use this! What presentation tools can it accommodate? Can I beta test if you go forward?
- contestant
Thanks for the kind words! We’d love to have you use the app, and we plan to fix the bugs right after judging. We plan to keep the service running after the competition, since a number of people have stated that they are interested in using it.
Thanks again! Nate
therazorbladejudgeDoes not work (could not resolve connect to demo address – happy to try again if you get it fixed).
- contestant
Sorry about that. Could you try it again? We had some issues with our Joyent server and just fixed it. Unfortunately, we broke the uploads toward the end of the competition, but the demo should work if you go to the URL given on the home page.
Thanks! Nate
- therazorbladejudge
Was finally able to get it going. This is really nice and could be really useful.
- contestant
Thanks for taking the time to give it another try! We will be fixing the bugs as soon as judging is over, and we hope that you are able to try it out with one of your presentations.
Thanks again! Nate
paularmstrong
contestantAs a presenter, I don’t want my audience flipping through my slides and taking things out of context. I also don’t want them distracted by things that I haven’t talked about yet. I’m not sure I understand that feature/use-case very well.
zachstronaut
contestantVery nice demo. It was a bit confusing that I joined with my actual iphone, but I was a viewer not a leader on my phone. I thought your demo was broken until I swiped the fake phone on the screen, and then I was happy to see my real phone update. I thought the whole point was for my phone to lead?
Swipe gestures were very close to native quality! Nice! Polls seemed a bit hacked in, but a good idea in principle if not yet practice.
As much as I personally like swipe gestures on the desktop/laptop… I don’t think a general audience is used to making a swipe with their mouse yet. You’ll probably need click to advance and/or next/prev buttons when not on mobile.
The tutorial below the demo was actually a bit distracting, taking my focus away from the demo which was much more interesting than all of that text. Can you just put all the tutorial INTO the slides, so they are one and the same?
Hrm… I’m realizing now that I can use my iphone as a remote to Keynote for an in-person audience already. And then I get all my silly animations and transitions.
As a remote presenting tool, it is nice that this requires no app download. However, I think you will need chat. And your competitors enable chat, voice, video, screensharing, etc — which are extremely valuable.
I guess I’m struggling now to think of when I’d actually use this particular feature set.
kfalter
contestantI have been working on a presentation all afternoon for a speech class at Notre Dame, and I’m doing it about V8 + HTML5. So truthfully, I was going to come back to nko and use this! I was all hyped but then I realized that it’s for PDFs respond if I’m wrong, but is there anyway to use your phone with slides done in html? That’s the issue because I need to be able to use a clicker, except my slides use deck.js and they don’t go to the next slide on typical audio/visual clicker :( So I was hoping to use slidejoin to manually do it with my phone. Anyway, it’s a cool idea, and I hope you guys make it available for more than PDFs :) And i don’t think you or the home page is lame Maybe make H3 font-style: normal; for tandelle, which is a pretty narrow typeface as it stands.
- contestant
Hi Kelsey,
Thanks for the feedback! We chose to start with PDFs, because most people still create their slides in PowerPoint or Keynote, and those applications can easily export to PDF format. Our focus was primarily on creating a compelling experience during the presentation. It would be a great addition to also support HTML slides.
You should also look at the Slide-Tap (http://nodeknockout.com/teams/maguilas) and Flips.io (http://nodeknockout.com/teams/sliders) Knockout projects, which were built for HTML slides.
kfalter
contestantyep! That’s what I ended up going with or at least right now…. The prez it at 9:30am est …. almost done haha. def. understand the mainstream appeal. just wish there wasn’t such an issue with going to the next slide via remote and html slides :) thanks goodluck with next steps!
ethan_andersonjudgeThis sounds like an awesome concept. But the presenter URL didn’t work so I couldn’t see it in action.
bnoguchi
contestantEthan, thanks for the positive comment.
You can test drive the presenter and audience ui from the home page. First, copy the generated url that looks like http://slidejoin.com/some-code on the home page into your iPhone or Android web browser. The home page should then load the slides into the fake phone on the home page and onto the projector in the background. The slides on your real phone represents the audience ui. The slides on the fake phone in the browser represents the presenter ui. Then, just follow the steps in the left column!
ekryskijudgeI really like this idea especially for having audience participation. The only other thing similar I have seen are these “clickers” you can buy that are some times used in academia. The overall site design is quite nice and there is enough functionality there to get the real attraction of the app but it seems there are a few kinks to work out. The app sometimes gets out of sync and the fluidity is not quite there yet. With that said, keep rolling with it! This idea is great and you guys did very well given the time period!
b00giZmjudgeLove the idea! This could be a killer tool for conferences. Being able to follow a presentation in my own speed and making it interactive with real-time polls is huge! Another great feature would be the ability to download the presentation right on my phone.
Too bad that the implementation is pretty buggy at this state. None of my own uploaded presentations worked (hint: Add a validation based on the MIME type). The demo presentation was okay, but there were still synchronization issues and a sometimes messed-up layout when displaying polls.
Also: The generated links are a pain! Typing them into your phone takes forever. A short URL would have been a more convenient solution.
Please take your time and finish this project :) I’d love to use it in the near future!
seanami
contestantYeah, unfortunately we broke upload at the very last minute. It’s not a validation error. It’s just that the very last step in the upload fails to store a value, which causes the whole thing to break. It was pretty disappointing considering that upload was the first feature we got working, but we plan to fix it as soon as judging is over!
I also agree about the generated links. The monikers are fun and memorable, but they’re not easy to type. Coreh suggested swapping the dash for a different character on the primary keyboard, which would help. I also think having QR codes for scanning would be pretty handy too.
Coreh
contestantPretty impressive, and really outstanding graphical design for something built in 48 hours. The slide changing felt fast and very responsive.
One confusing thing was the fact that on the home page the “virtual” phone was the presenter and my phone was the audience. IMO, should have been the other way around.
The upload interface did not work completely for me, as the presenter link resulted in a 404 error.
One suggestion: change the link scheme to something shorter, as these large words take some time to type on a smart phone, and the “–” symbol is not available on the default iPhone keyboard screen (you have to hit the “123” button for them)
- contestant
Coreh – I definitely thought about the whole presenter/audience phone thing while we were implementing this. I worried that, since the site speaks mostly to the presenter, having them use the audience phone for the demo might be a little awkward. My justification was that it would be like they were learning how to use it from another presenter before using it for themselves. I think we could switch it the other way around and it would work just as well.
Also, I hear you about the URLs being a pain to type. We wanted to integrate QR codes for each url, but didn’t have time to make space in the layout for them at the last minute. I think that will be way better than typing. And maybe we can replace the dashes with periods for those who are typing, so it’s on the main keyboard.
aaronblohowiak
contestant
zdanielshijudgeGreat idea. I get it. Hosted and synced slide sharing and presenting experience. Done right, this could be a big problem for Citrix or Adobe.
Was playing with it on iPad and Windows Phone. I was very impressed with the speed and responsiveness. But will that scale if and when this comes out from beta?
One question: is there any way to share audio?
- contestant
Thanks! On scaling, yes I believe so — we can plan to shard by presentation, so performance per presentation can be maintained. No way to share audio at the moment, but that’s a great idea!
mikealjudge
voodootikigodjudgefavorite thus far, needs the upload to work.
ctborg
contestantWow! Amazing work in 48 hours, almost feels like a complete project. Innovation-wise, you guys have a viable product.
Nice work gents!
Only a 3 for Completeness because I was unable to control my slides on my phone, I kept getting a 404 page.
luisivan
contestantCool and smart!
christkvjudgeVery cool little app to control presentation across mobile devices. I could see myself using this.
krisoft
contestantReally nice looking. You did steal my startup idea. :) unfortunately the upload was not working for me.
mustardamus
contestantfirebus
contestantjoaomilho
contestantI couldn’t actually test the app ‘cause I don’t have an iPhone… But it’s pure genious. Please keep this service runnin’.
carsonmcdonald
contestant
This is a great idea and so useful! The design looks good too and some of the usability features are nice (full screen on iphone, slide to next slide, etc). I did have some trouble uploading my slides (no error message for wrong format, not sure how public/private they are, and I never did get my deck to work even in pdf etc) and the urls are quite long to type on a phone. But the demo looks great and if this were all working as expected for me, I can imagine it being very useful in all kinds of situations. Nice innovation and good work!