Presentation Wizard creates documents which are probably most easily regarded as electronic books. Each document, or "presentation," can consist of as many pages as you like. The pages can be of whatever size suits the nature of what you wish to present, and can include a variety of "objects." Objects are the things that appear on the pages of a presentation and serve to differentiate it from a blank window.

Consider a conventional paper book with wholly blank pages. You could use such a book for a variety of purposes. Glue photographs to its pages and it would become an album. Print advertising on its pages and it would become a brochure. Unwind your grandfatherÆs fountain pen and write a novel upon its pages – it would become the sort of book that publishers reject without even bothering to crack the cover.

Presentation WizardÆs documents have something in common with a book of blank pages, in that you can place just about anything you like in one, and in so doing make it into whatever you need. In addition, like a book of blank pages, you can create things with it which are extremely simple, or fiendishly intricate and complex, depending upon your needs and how much of the documentation for this software you feel like reading.

This tutorial will walk you through creating a presentation with Presentation Wizard. By its nature, Presentation Wizard is almost infinitely flexible. Once you understand what itÆs up to, you will almost certainly be able to make it do things weÆve never thought of.

Note that Presentation Wizard includes a feature called Photo Album Wizard to help you build documents like this. You won't want to get involved with it right now – working through the following tutorial will help you familiarize yourself with the complete Presentation Wizard package – but you might want to keep in mind that there's a helpful shortcut to creating these sorts of documents in the future.

Your First Presentation: The Photograph Album

Traditional photograph albums are a fairly uninvolved species of paper books, and you can make one in Presentation Wizard with a minimum of mouse action. For this example, youÆll need several scanned photographs with something less than screen resolution. They can be in any image format supported by Presentation Wizard – JPG, PCX, BMP, PNG or TGA. If you want to be really traditional, they should be snapshots of your in-laws, a few sunsets, a rusted Studebaker that your neighbour has been in the process of restoring for most of a decade and at least one dog. Failing this, download anything you like from the net – itÆs only a tutorial exercise, and if your pictures are politically incorrect you can always delete æem later.

Your pictures should have dimensions on the order of 600 to 700 pixels across, and 400 to 500 pixels deep.

These are some example photographs to use in creating the presentation to be discussed in this tutorial, should you lack suitable scanned images of your own. These pictures are copyright © 1999, 2000 Steven William Rimmer, and may not be distributed, modified or reproduced in any way. Right click on each image and save it to your disk to create full-size JPG image files.

There are five suitable photographs shown to the right. These appear here thumbnails – if youÆd like to use these example pictures rather than locating some of your own, right click on each of them and select Save As, Save Picture As or Save Image As from the menu which appears. Remember where you saved them to, as youÆll want to import them into Presentation Wizard from their saved files in a moment.

LetÆs begin by creating a new presentation document. Run Presentation Wizard and select New from the File menu. Doing so will open a document window. The document window will be blank save for the word Header at the top.

The document window youÆve just created is actually a list of "blocks." Blocks are what Presentation Wizard uses to keep track of things in a presentation. There are only two sorts of blocks in a Presentation Wizard document:

• A Header block, of which there is always exactly one, and youÆre looking at it.
• Page blocks.

The Header block defines a few basic elements of your presentation. Page blocks store all the bits that make your presentation go.

Before you begin creating pages, youÆll probably want to define a few things in the Header block. Under Presentation Wizard, you can edit the contents of a block by double-clicking on it in a document window. Double click on the Header block to open its editor dialog.

The Header block editor is a bit involved, and you need not worry about everything therein right away. At the moment, we only really need to look at those features of the Header block editor which will affect:

• How the window in which your presentation will appear is to look.
• What the backgrounds for your pages will be.

ItÆs probably worth mentioning that everything in a presentation is editable, and you can make changes to your presentation's characteristics whenever you wish. The Header block items you set up now can be modified later if you turn out not to like them.

Begin by locating the Attributes control group. The Width and Depth fields define the size of the window in which your presentation will appear, measured in pixels. These fields default to a window 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels deep. You can change these if you like – keep in mind that your presentations might be viewed by people with screen resolutions less than that of your own computer. 800 by 600 is a safe place to start unless a significant portion of your potential user base bought their computers at garage sales.

Very early Windows machines, very cheap Windows machines and a few antediluvian laptops only support a screen resolution of 640 by 480 pixels. If youÆre really worried about your presentations being viewable on these hoary old antiques, donÆt make them any larger than 640 by 480 pixels. For practical purposes, this probably isnÆt something to be greatly concerned about.

While itÆs rarely an issue, you might want to keep in mind that the window dimensions of a Presentation Wizard presentation actually refer to the outside edge of the application window in which your presentation will be displayed. Because the windowÆs border, caption bar and so on will occupy some of the window, the actual useful space of your presentationÆs window will be somewhat smaller.

There are a number of check boxes in the Attributes group as well. YouÆll probably want to leave these as theyÆre set by default – with Caption, System Menu and Minimize left on, and the other options switched off. HereÆs what they all do:

• Caption: If this item is checked, your presentation window will include a caption bar, or title bar, at the top. Unless you have a good reason for wishing your application to behave otherwise, this is a good feature to include, as it will allow users of your presentation to position it on their desktop.
• System Menu: Enable this item to display a small icon at the left edge of the title bar with a system menu. The system menu for presentations includes additional items to display an About box and a dialog to jump between pages. The Caption item must be enabled for the System Menu item to be recognized.
• Resizable: The Resizable item will cause your presentation to be created with a resizable border, such that your users can grab its edges and change its size. This is usually a feature youÆll want to leave disabled, as by their nature the objects in a presentation will be of fixed dimensions.
• Minimize: The Minimize item will cause your presentation to display an active minimize button at the right edge of its title bar. This is a feature youÆll probably wish to leave enabled. The Caption item must be enabled for the Minimize item to be recognized.
• Maximize: The Maximize item will cause your presentation to display an active maximize button at the right edge of its title bar. This is a feature youÆll probably wish to leave disabled, for the same reason that the Resizable item should be disabled. The Caption item must be enabled for the Maximize item to be recognized.

The other group of controls youÆll want to check out now will be Background. We wonÆt get into what all these items do right at the moment. The important thing to know is that Presentation Wizard needs some guidance as to what you want the background of each of your pages to look like. It maintains a page background specification in the Header block of each presentation.

You need not have all your pages displayed with the same background. Some or all of your pages can override the "global" background characteristics defined in the Header block of your presentation. However, you should define a background you can live with while you have the Header block editor open.

To begin with, set the Background combo box to Custom. This tells Presentation Wizard to let you define the background colour. The other options in this combo box are a bit tricky, and they can wait for later in this tutorial.

Select the Solid background option and click on the colour button to the right of the Solid radio button. A colour selector will open. This is typical of the colour selectors which will turn up throughout Presentation Wizard. You might want to take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with it.

Presentation WizardÆs colour selectors will allow you to select colours quickly or with exacting precision. The colour selector window which opens when you click on a colour button will display 256 colours evenly dispersed between black and white. If youÆre just after an approximate colour and one of these looks near enough, click on it. The colour selector window will close and the colour button which originally opened it will assume the colour you selected.

If you need a more exacting colour definition, click on More and a complex colour selection dialog will appear. You can use it to define a colour using specific red, green and blue indices, or to select from one of a long list of named colours.

Use the Background colour button to choose a background colour you like the look of. Keep in mind that you wonÆt be constrained to use it for all your pages. The background will form a matt for your photographs – try to choose a colour which isnÆt unbearably ugly, and will compliment your pictures.

The background facilities of Presentation Wizard will also allow you to use graphics for your page backgrounds – weÆll get into this a little later too.

ItÆs a good idea to enter a title for your new presentation into the Title field of the Header block editor while you have it open. You might also want to describe it briefly in the About Dialog Text field. Once again, keep in mind that you can come back and change these items later.

When you think you have the Header block configured the way you want it, click on Preview to make sure itÆs what you had in mind. The Header block preview window will show you a page window for the presentation youÆre about to create. The window will be actual size – albeit with nothing in it – and it will use the border, caption and background characteristics youÆve chosen.

You can exit the preview window by right-clicking in it. If the preview window didnÆt look quite right, change the appropriate Header block parameters and click on Preview again. When youÆre satisfied with the appearance of your presentation window, click on OK to close the Header block editor dialog.

This would be a good time to save your presentation document. Select Save As and enter a name for your presentation. Click on Save.

Adding a Page

YouÆll need some pages to hold the photographs in your album. Unlike paper books, which usually come with a finite number of pages, Presentation Wizard documents begin life with no pages and await the addition of as many new pages as you need.

Click once on the Header block. YouÆll note that thereÆs a red or blue line along the lower portion of the block in the document window. This is called the "insertion cursor." New Page blocks always appear after the current location of the insertion cursor. Inasmuch as your presentation only has one block at the moment, itÆs a fairly safe bet where the first page is likely to appear.

To add a new page, click on the green plus sign in the tool bar, or select Insert Block from the Edit menu. A Page block will by added to your presentation document window. You should see a small representation of your new page in the document window – for the most part, it will be recognizable as such as it will have the background colour you selected in the Header block editor a moment ago. You can edit it by double-clicking on it. The window which appears should look pretty much like the one that opened when you clicked on Preview in the Header block editor a few moments ago.

By default, Presentation Wizard adds four buttons to every new page it creates, the "navigation buttons." These buttons will provide users of your presentation with a convenient, consistent way to change pages. While youÆll probably want to leave these buttons in place for the moment, itÆs worth noting that you can:

• Move the buttons to somewhere else on your page.
• Delete the buttons.
• Configure Presentation Wizard to generate new pages without these buttons through its Setup function.

The buttons that Presentation Wizard added to your page are referred to as "objects." Actually, everything on a page is called an object. YouÆre about to add a new object to your presentation, an Image.

To add a picture to your page, right-click anywhere in the background of the page editor window – be sure you donÆt right-click on one of the buttons just yet. A menu will appear. Select Insert to add a new page object. Select Image from the Insert sub-menu. Make sure you select Image, rather than Static Image. A File Open dialog will appear. Select the file type for the images youÆve gathered to create your photograph album with and select a picture.

After a few seconds to read your image file, your picture should appear – probably not exactly where you want it. You have just created your first page object. This would be a good time have a celebratory beer if youÆre into this sort of thing.

You can position your new page object by clicking and holding somewhere within the object and dragging it to a new location. Ideally, you should drag it to the center of your page.

If your picture is large enough to overlap the navigation buttons which Presentation Wizard initially added to your page, youÆll probably notice that theyÆve been obscured by your picture. Presentation Wizard displays things in the order they were originally added to a page. As your new Image object was added after the buttons, it will be displayed last, and as such will hide the buttons.

You can correct this by changing the order in which the objects on your page appear. Right-click somewhere within your Image object. A menu will appear. Select Order from this menu, and select Bottom. You have just re-ordered the objects on your page such that your Image object is the first object, rather than the last. The first object will be displayed first, and as such the later objects – the buttons – will appear on top of it. You should now be able to see the navigation buttons.

YouÆve just created your first page. ItÆs not a very complex page, and weÆll be back later to add some additional objects to it. You can close the page editor window by right-clicking somewhere in the page background and selecting Close from the menu that appears, or by clicking on the close button in the title bar of page editor window.

ItÆs a good idea to save the changes youÆve made to disk periodically as you create a presentation. Select Save from the File menu.

Having successfully mastered creating new pages, you should repeat the foregoing procedure to create a presentation with at least five or six pages, each having a different photograph. When youÆre done, save your work.

YouÆre ready to view your first presentation. While presentations are in fact self-viewing when they run outside Presentation Wizard, thereÆs a view mode which will allow you to see your work without having to run an external application. Click on the sunglasses button in the Presentation Wizard tool bar. Your presentation will open in a window. Unlike the page editor window, this one will be fully active. The buttons on your pages will work, as will any other objects which move or accept input.

YouÆll notice that the First and Previous buttons on your first page will be disabled. Presentation WizardÆs presentations automatically disable navigation buttons which arenÆt useful on your current page. ThereÆs no need for First or Previous buttons on the first page of a presentation. Likewise, the Next and Last buttons will be disabled on the final page of your presentation.

You can move through the pages of your presentation using the navigation buttons. When youÆre done, click on the close button in the title bar of your presentation to close it, or just right-click anywhere in the view window.

Adding Text Objects

As youÆll have noticed when you inserted an Image object on your first page, Presentation Wizard knows how to create quite a few object types. You can combine page objects in pretty much any quantity to build complex pages. For the moment, letÆs use a fairly simple one to add a title to your first photograph.

The Text object type allows you to add text to your pages. It can be used to create large titles or several paragraphs of smaller text. As with all Presentation WizardÆs objects, once a text object has been created, in can subsequently be edited and repositioned.

Open the editor for the first page in your presentation by double-clicking on its Page block. Right-click somewhere in the background area of your page to open the page menu. Make sure you donÆt inadvertently right-click on the photograph. Select Insert from the menu, and select Text from the Insert menu. A new text object will appear. By default, text objects use unadventurous black text against a grey background. WeÆll look at how this can be changed in a moment.

The new text object youÆve created is going to be the title for your photograph. Position it above your picture. You should also resize it, such that it occupies enough space for a respectable title. You can resize text objects like this:

1. Move your mouse cursor to an edge of the object. When itÆs correctly positioned, it will turn into an arrow.
2. Click and drag the edge of a text object to resize it.

The resizing cursor will be a horizontal or vertical arrow if itÆs positioned near the center of an objectÆs edge, and a diagonal arrow if itÆs positioned near a corner. As an aside, not all object types allow for resizing. Text object and button objects, for example, can be resized. Image objects cannot be resized, as their size will be determined by the size of the images they contain. If an object cannot be resized, placing your cursor over its edge will not cause the cursor to turn into resizing arrows.

YouÆll need to edit your new Text object to choose its font, colour and other characteristics. Double-click in your Text object to open its editor dialog.

The Text object editor dialog includes controls to set the position of your Text object, and to determine its appearance. The former will be found in the editors for all the objects Presentation Wizard knows how to work with. HereÆs what each of these controls do

A note about fonts: You can set the text in a Text object in any font you like, with one minor catch. While Presentation Wizard will use any font you tell it to, the font in question will have to be installed on whichever machines your presentations run on as well. If you design a presentation to use a font called Nuclear Accident Sanserif and Nuclear Accident Sanserif doesn't happen to be available on the machines that ultimately run your presentation, all your text will appear in another font – most likely Courier.

You can deal with the issues posed by unusual typefaces in a number of ways. They're discussed in fonts and font embedding section of the Reference document.

Choose a font and its associated characteristics for your Text object. Click on OK when youÆre done. Keep in mind that if you donÆt like what your initial selection looks like, you can double click on your Text object to open its editor dialog and change your selections.

When you get your page title set up the way you like it, close the editor for your first page and save your presentation document to disk. Use the View button of the Presentation Wizard tool bar – the sunglasses – to view your page.

Changing the Page Properties

By default, the background for each of your pages will be whatever colour you defined while you were editing the Header block earlier in this tutorial. You can, in fact, override the Header block background settings for any pages you like.

Double click on a Page block to open its page editor window. Right click somewhere in the background of your page to display the Page menu. Select Properties to open the Page Properties dialog.

The Page Properties dialog will allow you to enter a title for your page – something you should do for every page you create – and to override the Header block background characteristics. The page title will appear in the caption bar for your presentation, and will be used by the Page menu, to be touched on later in this tutorial.

If you look at the Background control group of the Page Properties dialog, youÆll note that the Background combo is currently set to Header. This tells your page to use the background characteristics defined by your Header block. To override the Header background, change the selection of the Background combo box to Custom.

The Custom option will cause your page to ignore the Header block background characteristics and use the background youÆre about to define.

While the page backgrounds weÆve looked at thus far have been solid colours, Presentation Wizard can use graphics for your page backgrounds as well. You can have it use a single graphic positioned in the center of your page, or you can use a small graphic tiled over your page area to create a texture. Suitable graphics for the latter background option are pretty easy to find – check out any graphic archive on the web for dozens of them.

To create a textured background for your page, do the following:

1. Make sure the Custom option of the Background combo box has been selected.
2. Select the Picture radio button.
3. Click on the Select button. A File Open dialog will appear. Select the background graphic you wish to use. Note that you can open background graphics in any of the graphic file formats supported by Presentation Wizard. Most textured backgrounds intended for use on web pages will be in the JPG format.
4. Switch on the Tiled option.

When you exit the Page Properties dialog, your page will display the textured background youÆve selected.

As an aside, itÆs a good idea to use the colour button of the Background group to choose a colour similar to the dominant colour of your background tile if youÆll be using a graphic background. While a tiled background will effectively obscure the solid colour beneath it, complex pages may display areas of the solid colour for an instant as theyÆre displayed. Choosing a suitable background colour will make this much less objectionable.

Thus far, weÆve ignored the other colour options in the Background combo boxes of the Header and Page Properties editors – things like Scroll Bar, Inactive Caption Text, Button Highlight and so on. These selections probably call for a bit of explanation.

When you installed Windows – and perhaps several times thereafter if youÆre particular about how your Windows desktop appears – you probably selected a Windows "colour scheme." Colour schemes can be set through the display applet of the Windows Control Panel if you select the Appearance tab. The colour schemes which come with Windows include visual oddities such as Marine, Spruce, Pumpkin and Wheat. In the latter case, be advised that if your wheat crop comes up displaying these colours, itÆs unquestionably not fit for human consumption.

Each colour scheme defines a set of "system colours" which Windows uses to draw things like dialog box captions, scroll bars, application windows and so on. ItÆs a reasonable assumption that the colours used to draw these objects will attractive to the users of the machines upon which your presentations will be displayed – even if youÆd find them ugly enough to mutate bacteria.

If you define the backgrounds of pages as system colours, rather than as absolute colours set by a colour button, your presentations will always be displayed against backgrounds in keeping with the colours used on the systems which run them. They may be unspeakably objectionable if some of their users are a bit tasteless – but theyÆll be consistent.

The Background combo boxes in Presentation WizardÆs Header and Page Properties dialogs will show you the system colours as they appear on your system, based on the colour scheme youÆve selected for Windows. These colours will change when your presentations run on other computers.

Keep in mind that page objects such as buttons are always drawn by Windows using the appropriate system colours.

Adding an Animation

Presentation WizardÆs pages can include animations. YouÆll probably have noticed this if you viewed the example presentation which was installed with Presentation Wizard.

Animations on web pages are stored as GIF files. The GIF format is actually a really bad choice for animations, as itÆs both technologically restrictive – supporting fewer colours and animation options than it should – and beset with legal problems. Presentation Wizard imports animations from files in the MNG format, which overcomes a lot of the limitations of GIF files.

The current version of Alchemy MindworksÆ GIF Construction Set Professional animation package includes a function in its File menu called Export to MNG. It will allow you to open existing GIF files and write equivalent MNG files from them, suitable for use with Presentation Wizard. While these animations will still have the technological limitations inherent in GIF animations, they wonÆt cause a hell-spawned legion of blood-encrusted lawyers to carry your pleading soul back to their unclean domain to suffer ceaseless torments until the end of time, something well worth thinking about.

You can create better MNG animations with our PNG/MNG Construction Set software – it will build animations which take advantage of the enhanced colour depth of the MNG format, and generally look better.

For this exercise, letÆs add an animation to the second page of your photograph album presentation. Double click on the second Page block in your document window to open its page editor window. As with the Text object you created a few minutes ago, right-click somewhere in the background area of your page and select Insert from the menu which appears. Select Animation from the Insert menu.

The Animation insertion function will prompt you to select a MNG file. In the perhaps likely event that you donÆt have one handy, thereÆs an example animation called SYMBOL.MNG in the Presentation Wizard parent directory. Select this file.

Your animation will appear in your page editor window as a still image displaying the first frame of your animation. You can position this object by dragging it, as with the earlier objects discussed in this document. Animations are one of the object types which cannot be resized.

You can view your animation in motion by exiting the page editor window and clicking on the View button in the Presentation Wizard tool bar, the sunglasses. Because youÆve added an animation to the second page of your presentation, youÆll want to click on the Next button in your presentation window to advance to the second page. A spinning graphic like the one in the Presentation Wizard startup window – and in the title graphic for this document – will appear as part of your presentation.

Animations under Presentation Wizard display using the characteristics set for them in whichever animator you used to build them. The speed at which they move, the number of times they loop and so on are all matters for your animation software to set up before you import your animation into Presentation Wizard.

As with all the things you can add to a Presentation Wizard document, once an animation has been imported into your page, it will become part of your final EXE file. You will not need to distribute the original source MNG file with your Presentation Wizard EXE document file.

You can add multiple animations to a Presentation Wizard page – keep in mind, however, that running an animation occupies some of Presentation WizardÆs resources. A small number of animations will not tax them unduly – dozens of animations running at once will most likely get you into trouble, especially if you run your presentations on low-end computers with slow processors and limited memory. In this case, "trouble" may mean all your animations slowing down, or some of them failing to run entirely.

In addition, of course, a page with dozens of animations is likely to look monumentally tacky and in reprehensible taste.

Presentation WizardÆs resources are also called for to run other things that move, such as animated images and applets. WeÆve not dealt with either of these as yet. In creating pages with lots of objects, take care not to have too many of them moving at once.

You can access the animation editor for your Animation object by returning to the page editor for the page it resides on and double-clicking on your animation. Having said this, the Animation editor does little more than set the position of an animation numerically and configure a number of other internal parameters.

Once again, you might want to save your updated Presentation Wizard document to disk.

Enabling Image Transitions

The Image objects you created to place your photographs in Presentation WizardÆs pages have a hidden side. They can do more than just display pictures still pictures. Image objects include functions to make your images appear and disappear on a page with a variety of sophisticated animated transitions.

Double click on the third Page block in your Presentation Wizard document window. Double-click on the picture therein to open its Image editor dialog. The Image object editor dialog will include the same position controls as were discussed earlier in dealing with Text objects. The features specific to Images blocks are as follows:

Paint: If you click on the Paint button in an Image editor dialog, your image will open in a Paint window – by default, Windows Paint. You can edit your image using any of the tools of the Paint window. When you exit the Paint window, your updated image will be replaced in your source Image object. You can use the Paint function crop images too.

Effects: The Effects group of controls in the Image editor dialog will let you enable animated transitions for your image. ThereÆs one transition each for your picture appearing and then disappearing. The default selections will cause your picture to be displayed without transitions – you can experiment with the Transition In and Transition Out combo boxes to change this. The Preview button will show you what your transition selections look like.

The following are the available effects for transitions:

You can also adjust the following transition parameters:

Select transition settings for your Image object – or, if you canÆt make up your mind, select Random for both Transition In and Transition Out to have a randomly chosen transition selection used each time your image is displayed. Enable the Loop option. Click on OK, exit the page editor for your page and use the Presentation Wizard View function to see the results of your selections.

Adding Sound

In addition to dealing with visual elements, Presentation WizardÆs documents can include sounds. Sound can be generated from digitized audio, imported from Windows WAV files, and from sequenced music, imported from MIDI files. In this example weÆll deal with the former – MIDI music works in precisely the same way.

LetÆs add a sound to the fourth page of your photograph album. Double click on the fourth Page block in your Presentation Wizard document window to open its page editor. Use the right-click menu to access its Insert menu and select Sound. A File Open dialog will appear. Select a suitable WAV file.

Sound objects appear in Presentation WizardÆs page editors as an icon. Because sounds are non-visual, this icon will provide you with something to double click on to access the Sound object editor. The icon will not appear in your final pages, although the sounds you add to your pages will be heard.

If you double click on a Sound object icon to access its editor, youÆll be able to set its position parameters and hear what the sound in question sounds like by clicking on Preview.

Only one sound can play at a time. If you start a new sound while an existing sound is playing, the previous sound will be stopped. This is true even if one sound is a WAVE and the other is MIDI music.

By default, a sound added to a Presentation Wizard page will begin playing as soon as the page appears. You can change this – sounds can begin playing for all sorts of other reasons. WeÆll get to this next, when we deal with the dark and turgid waters of object notification.

If this was a movie, some ominous music would play now.

Notification

Thus far, all the page objects youÆve created have done whatever they were put there to do in isolation. In fact, page objects on the same page can communicate among themselves using what Presentation Wizard refers to as "notification." Notification is the ability of one page object to send a message to another page object and tell it to wake up and start doing whatever it was put there to do.

A page object which begins doing what it was put there to do as soon as the page it appears on is displayed is said to be "enabled." A page object which doesnÆt is said to be "disabled" – youÆd probably have guessed that. A disabled page object can be enabled by being notified by another object.

LetÆs create a simple notification. Return to the editor for the page where you added a sound a few minutes ago. Double-click on the Sound object you created to access its editor. Turn off the Enabled option. This will prevent the sound from playing when your page appears. It will wait for notification from another source.

YouÆll now want to create something to notify the sound and make it play. Most page objects can generate notifications – for the moment, letÆs use a button object. Right click somewhere in the background area of your page and insert a new Button object. Double click on the button to access its editor dialog.

To begin with, change your new buttonÆs Title text to something appropriate – Click Me, perhaps. Having done this:

1. Use the Action combo box to select the Notify action. Button objects can actually do all sorts of things when you click on them.
2. Use the Target Object combo box to select the Wave Sound object you added in the foregoing section of this tutorial. Note that the combo box item for this selection has a number – this corresponds to the identification number that appeared in the editor dialog for your Sound object. You neednÆt worry about this right now – Presentation Wizard will keep track of these numbers for you.

Click on OK in the Button object editor and exit your page editor. Use the View function of Presentation WizardÆs tool bar to view your page. YouÆll note that the sound youÆve added to this page does not play when the page appears – at least, it wonÆt if you switched off its Enabled option. It will play if you click on the Click Me button you added.

When you clicked on the Click Me button, it notified the previously disabled Sound object on your page, which began playing.

When a sound finishes playing, it can notify other objects. For example, it could notify an Image object. HereÆs how youÆd set this up on the foregoing page.

1. Open the page editor for the page you added a Sound object to.
2. Double click on the Sound object to access its editor dialog.
3. Enable its Notify option.
4. Use its Target Object combo box to select the Image object on your page.
5. Click on OK.

YouÆve just instructed your Sound object to notify your Image object when the sound finishes playing. YouÆll need to configure the Image object to respond appropriately to the notification.

1. Double click on the Image object to open its editor dialog.
2. Switch off the Enabled item. This will prevent your Image object from displaying itself until it receives a notification from somewhere.
3. Select transitions with the Transition In and Transition Out combo boxes of the Image editor dialog and set a delay of 10 seconds.
4. Disable the Loop option.
5. Click on OK.

Exit the page editor and view you page. Your image should be nowhere to be seen this time. If you click on the Click Me button, your sound should play. When the sound is finished, your image should transition in, wait for ten seconds and then transition out again.

When an Image object completes its transition out, it can send a notification to another object – you could hang another page object on your Image object, and have it notified when your pictureÆs finished dancing. Alternately, you could have your Image object notify the Sound object which notified it, effectively creating a loop which would continue until the user of your presentation changed pages or blew his or her computer away with an AK-47 to stop the noise.

In order for an Image object to generate a notification when it finishes its transition, its Loop option must be disabled. An Image object can only generate a notification when it finishes its transitions, and if itÆs looping, it will never finish.

Presentation WizardÆs notification facility is immensely powerful and extremely easy to master. You can use it to create interactive pages and all manner of special effects.

Timer objects are concerned almost entirely with notification. A Timer object receives a notification from another message, or when the page itÆs on is first displayed, waits for a predetermined time and then sends a notification to another object. In fact, Timer objects can do a few things in addition to this, as weÆll discuss in the next section – for the moment, letÆs look at their place in pages with objects that send notifications.

The simplest application of timers is to have one begin timing when your page is displayed, and then do something when its time runs out. To see this in action, return to the fourth page in your presentation and insert a timer object. Like Sound objects, Timer objects will display as icons in a page editor window and will be invisible in your presentation when itÆs viewed Double-click on the Timer object icon youÆve created to access its editor dialog.

If a Timer object is enabled, it will begin timing as soon as the page itÆs part of is displayed. For the moment, letÆs switch on the Enabled option.

Select the Notify option of the Action combo box of your Timer object. Use the Target Object combo box of the Timer editor to select the Sound object you added to your page several minutes ago.

Set the Duration field to 15 seconds.

Click on OK to exit the Timer dialog and close the page editor window. View your page. DonÆt do anything else for at least fifteen seconds. After a fifteen-second pause, the sound you added to your page should play, after which your image transition should be activated.

The Timer you just created waited for fifteen seconds and then sent out the same notification which would have occurred if someone had clicked on the Click Me button on your page.

You might want to experiment with the Timer object youÆve created. Try switching off its Enable option and have it notified by another object, such as your Image object when it finishes its transition. This will cause your Sound object to play, followed by your Image objectÆs transition, followed by your Timer objectÆs delay, followed by the whole cycle beginning again. Users of such a presentation will still probably want to blow their computers away in time, but with a delay in the loop itÆll probably take a bit longer.

Button objects can also be created with their Enabled options switched off. If you do so, youÆll create a greyed button which cannot be clicked. Notifying a disabled button will enable it, and make it clickable. You might want to see if you can create a button object on your page which is initially disabled, and which becomes enabled after fifteen seconds. Software designers often make buttons do this encourage users of their software to read whateverÆs in the window the button in question closes – the beg notice in Presentation Wizard, for example, does this.

Most page objects can respond to notifications in some form, and most of them can generate notifications. The exceptions are things like Text objects, which just appear on a page and donÆt do anything. ThereÆs a detailed discussion of what each page object does with notifications in the Reference document for Presentation Wizard.

The Secret Lives of Buttons and Timers

If you double click on a Button object and open its Action combo box, youÆll notice that it can do quite a few things besides notifying other page objects. Timer objects have the same choice of options. You can configure buttons and timers to handle a number of tasks in a presentation without adding further objects.

HereÆs what each of these Action selections will do when a button so configured is clicked on. The same action selections apply to timers when they time out.

The Document field of a Button or Timer object editor defines the document to be opened if the button or timer in question has Open Document selected as its Action. The document can be of any type for which there is an associated application on the machine that will be running your presentation. Common file types, such as WordPad DOC files, are a good choice. In fact, the most useful application for this field is to store web page URLs – in which case your presentations will boot up a web browser, fetch the page in question over the internet and display it.

There are all sorts of applications for these options. For example, you might:

• Add a Quit buttons to your pages. This is pretty much essential if you create a presentation with not caption bar, as there will be not other way to exit. Avoid creating presentations with only one Quit button, on the final page – itÆs coercive, nasty and liberal.
• Create a slide show with self-changing pages. Add a Timer object to each page which has its Enabled option switched on, and its Action set to Next Page.
• Add buttons to your pages to display the About dialog for your presentation, and perhaps the Page menu. The latter hasnÆt been discussed as yet – itÆs a dialog that allows users of your presentations to select a new page based on its name, rather than clicking through all the intervening pages. Both these options can be accessed from the System menu for your presentation, but dedicated buttons will make them more apparent.
• Add a button to your presentation to access your web page. This will, of course, only work if users of your presentations are on line when they access this feature. No real harm will come to them if theyÆre not. Note that while you can configure a timer to do this as well, itÆs probably not a good idea to have a web browser open for no apparent reason shortly after a page displays.
• Add a button to a page which plays music to shut the music off. A button which has Disable as its Action option and a Sound or MIDI object as its Target Object selection will silence the music in question if itÆs clicked.

YouÆll no doubt be able to think of others as you become more familiar with Presentation Wizard.

Additional Object Types

This tutorial has omitted several more advanced objects, including checkboxes, radio buttons, text edit fields, list boxes and most notably, applets. While hardly rocket science – unless youÆre dealing with a few recent Mars probes that disappeared and were never heard from again – these things are arguably beyond the scope of this tutorial. Applets, programs written in the ANIMAL language, require a bit more that just pointing and clicking. The ANIMAL Language Reference installed with Presentation Wizard will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the subject. It includes both an introductory tutorial and a complete language function reference.

Applets can be used to both draw things that are beyond the scope of simpler objects and to manage complex notification strategies. You can, for example, have an object notify an applet, which would in turn notify several other objects simultaneously, enable and disable objects and so on.

You can safely ignore all this for a while – at least until youÆve got the more elementary aspects of Presentation Wizard firmly by the throat.

The Example Presentation

The EXAMPLE.EXE presentation thatÆs included with Presentation Wizard can both demonstrate some of its better tricks and serve as a useful font of bits to swipe for your own presentations. If you open it in Presentation Wizard, you can see what itÆs up to and how all its page objects interact with each other.

HereÆs a quick overview of its pages.

The introduction page of EXAMPLE.EXE includes several fairly obvious objects – like the Image that transitions in – and a few less obvious ones, like that unusual animated bar along the top. The latter is an ANIMAL applet – while weÆll touch on what it does here, youÆll probably have to immerse yourself in the ANIMAL language, however briefly, to fully appreciate what itÆs up to.

The picture that appears in the lower left corner of the introduction page is a still graphic which has been stored as an Image object. It uses the Sandstorm transition to appear, and the No Clear transition out, such that it never disappears. Its Loop option has been disabled, so once it shows up, it stays put. This is an enabled object, which means that it will begin to transition in as soon as the page itÆs on is displayed.

As aside, you could build this page such that the Image object wasnÆt enabled, but rather was notified by another object. At various times in the development of this page, it was configured such that the Image object was notified by the moving bar applet, such that the image began its transition in once the bar had finished drawing.

The Image object has been configured to notify a Wave object when it completes its transition in, such that a sound plays when the picture has fully appeared.

ThereÆs a second Wave object on the page which has been enabled, such that it plays as soon as the page is displayed. The same object appears on every page in this presentation, and generates a distinctive sound every time someone changes pages. If you use a similar structure in your own presentations, make sure you choose a short and non-intrusive sound to prevent your users from going after their PC speakers with a pair of garden shears.

The spinning Presentation Wizard logo in the upper right corner of the introduction page was created as an animation with PNG/MNG Construction Set and imported into Presentation Wizard. Its original source images were rendered with a three-dimensional modeling package. You can use pretty well any web page GIF animation in much the same way by transforming it to a MNG file with the Export to MNG function of GIF Construction Set Professional. YouÆll need GIF Construction Set Professional 2.0a patch 21 or better.

The text on the introduction page is all handled as Text objects. The Presentation Wizard title has been availed of a three-dimensional appearance by enabling its drop shadow and highlight options.

The animated bar graphic is arguably the most complex thing on the introduction page. ItÆs an ANIMAL applet. It draws an initial coloured bar, then repeatedly moves it slightly to the right and fills in the gap at the left with new lines. You can see how it works by double-clicking on it in the Presentation Wizard page editor – be warned that some recourse to the ANIMAL language reference might be called for if youÆre new to applets.

The second page of the example presentation is a simulation of the top of our web page at http://www.mindworkshop.com/alchemy/alchemy.html. You can see our real page either by clicking on the foregoing link or by running the example presentation, selecting this page and clicking on the Real Page button.

The Real Page button is an example of a Button object which has been configured to use its Open Document option. The Document field for this Button object contains the address of our page. Clicking on the button will cause Windows to open a web browser and load the real Alchemy Mindworks web page.

Keep in mind that, depending on the time between when your version of Presentation Wizard was built and when you run EXAMPLE.EXE, our real page might have changed a bit.

As an aside, you can use the Open Document feature of Presentation Wizard to do all sorts of other things. For example, if you had it open an AVI file, you could play videos from within a presentation. You might want to use the OpenDocument function of an applet to do this, rather than a button. While both perform the same function, an applet will allow you to configure a specific path for the document you want to open.

The elements on the second page of the example presentation have all been swiped from our real web page. The textured background was applied through the page properties function as a tiled picture. The moving blue bullet animation is an animated GIF file on our web page – it was converted to MNG through the Export to MNG function of GIF Construction Set.

The unicorn is a Static Image object. Again, it started out as a transparent GIF file. It was converted to PNG with Graphic Workshop Professional, and its transparency was re-established with PNG/MNG Construction Set. The same is true of the Alchemy Mindworks graphic. You can create embossed text like this with the Banner functions of GIF Construction Set Professional and PNG/MNG Construction Set.

The third page of the example presentation illustrates most of the page object types Presentation Wizard knows how to work with. Not everything will be exactly as it seems if you open this page in the page editor.

The Click Me button has been configured to notify the pageÆs only applet. YouÆll find the applet immediately to the right of this button in the page editor. Note that because this applet doesnÆt actually draw anything, itÆs location on this page is immaterial. If you double click on the applet to the right of the Click Me button, youÆll find ANIMAL programming at its most unplugged. This applet displays a message box dialog and quits.

Because the applet is not enabled, it will only operate when itÆs notified by another object – in this case, by the Click Me Button. If you click on Click Me, the applet will be notified and will display its message.

The animation on the Presentation WizardÆs Toys page is another GIF file that was exported through GIF Construction Set Professional.

The two giant black dog pictures illustrate Static Image and Image objects. The left one has a transparent background, while the right one will repeatedly transition in and out. The transition options for this Image object have been set to Random, such that it can select different transition options for each cycle.

These pictures are not to scale. TheyÆre not even close. Be grateful this isnÆt your dog.

Note that what appear to be three page object icons to the right of the text for Digitized Sound, MIDI Music and Dynamic Timers are in fact simply Image objects with no transitions enabled. These are the actual graphics used as icons for these object types. As theyÆre intended to illustrate the objects themselves, which are invisible on a displayed page, theyÆre represented here by pictures.

The final page of the example presentation illustrates an advertisement for some of Steven William RimmerÆs books. In answer to the obvious question – why does it advertise his books rather than an all-expense paid luxury cruise to beautiful Pitcairn Island (air fare, accommodations, meals, drinks, transportation and gratuities not included) – itÆs probably worth pointing out that Steve owns Alchemy Mindworks, while he has no stock in any cruise operators that weÆre aware of.

The animated book covers are handled by a particularly sneaky application of Image objects. There are four of them on this page – one for each book cover – all placed in the same location. Each one use the Sandstorm transition to appear and disappear, and each one has been configured to notify the next Image object in the stack. The final Image object notifies the first one, and the pictures keep appearing and disappearing indefinitely.

The green and yellow gradient in the center of the page is a frame. It has been configured to use the Gradient option, and to display its gradient at an angle.

Don't Stop Reading Now

Presentation Wizard is a powerful and exceedingly flexible application for creating your own presentation documents. To make the most of it, be sure to check out the Reference document and the other documentation files included with this package.