Besos Loves Slides

There's an amazing story about Amazon. One day Jeff Besos saw a PowerPoint presentation so heinous, so evil, so boring, that he full on banned PowerPoint presentations at Amazon. Immediately after this presentation he emailed the entire company declaring all PowerPoint presentations dead.

Can you imagine being the guy who gave this fateful presentation? I personally would be proud. I'd take that .ppt on the road and show everyone the power of POWER POINT! Who knew it has the ability to destroy the will of even the wealthiest of individuals with its unmitigated and complete boredom.

This project is a celebration of that one PPT presentation. That .ppt that sent Jeff into a tailspin of madness. It seeks to bring Jeff Besos painful memories of that one fateful day when he crashed out over some slides in a boardroom.

Status

This is mostly a simple presentation tool for my videos in my courses. I decided to take some of the knowledge from my Game Development adventures and use those to make something better than PowerPoint for my use cases. I mostly need to show text and some videos for a short amount of time on a randomly attached monitor while also looking at a status screen on another one.

Currently you can run besos.exe (it might work on other platforms, let me know) and give it a .md file formatted to have slides. See samples/about-bezos.md which is a quick example from one of my courses.

Features

1. Metadata at the top is json which can set fonts, sizes, etc.
2. Slides start with ===.
3. Each slide is separated with ---.
4. Each slide can also have json metadata for font sizes, shaders, colors, etc.
5. Use # Title on the first line for the title.
6. Everything after is content.
7. Hot reloading mostly works.
8. There's a remote control program bezos_ctl you can use from the command line.
9. There's one for windows named bezos_ctrl that won't open a cmd.exe.
10. You can apply shaders to slides.
11. Horrible performance for now.
12. Separate control window to see current/next slides and control the present window.
13. The ability to easily move the present window to another monitor (only tested on Windows).

Supported "Markdown"

It's barely markdown at this point, but look in samples/about-bezos.md for a demo of everything. The features supported are:

{}

JSON meta data can go at the top of the deck and on each slide. Settings at the top are defaults and you change then in the slides.

#

This tags the line as the title. You can change its style using "title_" options.

Plain Text

Just put lines of text.

*

Bullet points are supported, but nothing fancy.

!(assets/some_image.jpg)

Images are supported and should work with at least .png and .jpg.

![cell_name](assets/some_image.jpg)

You can explicitly place an image in a specific cell by giving the cell name where you'd normally put alt text.

That's it. The parser is also very basic and gives terrible errors. If you make a change and nothing reloads then check the logs in the console.

Available Metadata Options

Shaders

You can apply a shader to your slide with "shader": "name". The shaders are configured in assets/shaders.json but I may change this to be just a file.

Here's an example from samples/about-bezos.md:

{
  "shader": "flame",
  "bg_color": [80, 0, 0, 255],
  "layout": "no_title",
  "font_size": 200
}
I Made a
PowerPoint
Killer

I'm actually not very good at writing shaders, but I'm sure you'll cook up something really great.

Layout Language

The layouts are defined in assets/layouts.json and use my layout description language from lel-guecs.

Layout Expression Language (lel) is a small language that describes how ragged arrays of cells are structured. The idea is that you define where stuff goes separate from the stuff that goes there. This makes it easier to work out common UI layouts and reuse them, and also makes your code way simpler. Instead of crazy nested objects inside objects you just create a layout and put stuff in it like a container.

I'll document this further in a later release, but ifyou look at "default_ui" in `assets/layouts.json" you see this:

"[t_left|t_center|t_right]",
"[*%(100,600)slide]",
"[_]",
"[_]",
"[_]",
"[_]",
"[_]",
"[=title|=*%(200,100)description|_|_|_]"

This is multiple strings only because JSON doesn't have a multiline string. This is converted into a single string to define the layout.

The [] Creates a single cell. The [t_left] creates a cell name t_left. The [*%(100,600)slide] says, "Expand (*) to fill percent (%) 100 wide by 600 long." In this case the slide cell will take up 1 column and 6 rows. If you see = that means to center it.

Command Line Remote

There's a builddir/bezos_cli that allows for remote control of your presentation. It can do most things the control window does. Here's the options:

-L/-R

Move the present window to the "Left" or "Right" screen.

-N/-P

Next and Previous slide.

-q

Quit.

-f

Toggle full screen.

-p

What port to use.

WARNING This works by opening a UDP port on port 9898. If it doesn't work that's probably why. Also, it should only be on localhost but let me know if it's getting it wrong.

bezos_cli vs. bezos_ctrl

You may notice there's a bezos_cli and bezos_ctrl but only on Windows. This is because Windows makes a distinction between "console" apps and "windows" apps.

The bezos_cli is what you want when using it from the command line or on Unix systems. It just works like you think it does and the code is in src/bezos_ctl.cpp.

The bezos_ctrl is compiled as a windows subsystem app so when run it does no console output. This lets you run it in things like Stream Deck and other launchers without popping open a cmd.exe window to run it.

Future Features

I'm pretty good with this so far but I may tinker with it more later. If you have ideas or requests send them to help@learncodethehardway.com and I'll take a look.

Or...just write your own. This ain't that hard.