File::Find::Rule (this should be the final renaming, unless petdance suddenly comes up with a better one again) is almost ready to go to the CPAN, I'm just leaving it to settle for a bit so I'm sure the docs are good, it should head up mid-afternoon UK time.
I stumbled across my fans list. My there are a lot of people watching me, I hope that it's not because I've been overly stupid.
I think I may watch slightly more people, but then I have automation for that.
I'm back to using Mac OS X since I figured out how to enable the L2 cache on my Lombard, so I've been poking around with The Omni Groups excellent tools. In the past I've confessed my love for OmniWeb, but earlier today I noticed that OmniOutliner uses the standard ProperyList DTD, which could be very useful, but first a digression.
Another common complaining point is that XML::Simple muddles attributes and elements on output. If it could be given a DTD it could look at something like:
And magically do the right thing with the version attribute of a plist element. Of course one issue is that most hand-rolled XML documents don't have a DTD defined, but you just can't help some people help themselves.
My interest in ths stems from an idea I had a few days back. PowerPoint is a really good presentation tool, but people spend all their time exactly laying things out, and getting the transitions right. Change your mind about the styling of your slides and you may as well just start again with a new slideshow.
I also discovered that OSX now had AppleScript, and that "Office Applications support AppleScript automation". Something in my head translated this into "why not generate AppleScript from a template, which when run generates a slideshow." It further teased "This means you'll be able to use some format that's easy to edit, and you'll be able to use pictures of happy babies but still generate nice html slides when you're done"
As it turned out, PowerPoint has a useless AppleScript interface which consists of exactly one method:
do Visual Basic: Execute a Visual Basic script do Visual Basic string -- The script to execute [Result: anything] -- the result of the script
Laugh? I nearly tried.
So anyway, now my thoughts have turned to editing in OmniOutline, outputting onto formats useful to MagicPoint, AxPoint, and maybe, if it itches enough, VB for PowerPoint. Actually I may make the input formats vary too, so there could be the potential of taking MagicPoint and producing AxPoint, or something.
Anything to avoid worrying about the slides themselves, of course.
Re:typo
richardc on 2002-07-24T13:41:22
Good catch. Thanks.My brain farted and said "I can't ship huge files just to test this", so I didn't write the test. Now the sqwishy thing realises that I can test that there's nothing that big, and so I do.
