Portfolio is a very simple media display tool produced by WECC, (Warwickshire Educational Computing Centre). The program lets you display a sequence of graphic images and, if appropriate, associated sound samples. It is a nice presentation package, suitable for home, school or business use.
What do you get?
The software comes in a plastic fold-over wallet containing four discs and an A5 manual. The manual consists of 36 pages, is well written and well presented, and explains the software in a concise manner which will have anybody making presentations in no time at all.
Disc one contains the program, !System and !Scrap, taking up a massive 160Kb. The rest of the disc and the other three discs are filled with example presentations, used to good effect to show how simple the software is to use.
Requirements
The minimum requirements for this package are RISC OS 3.1 or higher, preferably a hard drive, (it will run from floppy, only slower) and 2Mb of memory. Obviously, if you start using high resolution graphics and large JPEG files or the like, a larger memory machine will be needed. When using these files, it must also be noted that the timing will be inconsistent with the configuration setting, due to the time these files take to load Ö you rich people out there with Risc PCs will have little or no trouble. (Iæve just gone green!)
The program
There is no copy protection on the disc, so backup first or install to hard disc. The program can be installed anywhere on the disc you wish. The configuration window is the main item, which allows several settings to control the manner the frames load and wipe. You can run your presentation in a carousel fashion, i.e. when the end is reached, it restarts and goes on ad infinitum, or you can set it for a single pass. There are 16 fade options, such as diamonds Ö when the current screen is due to be changed, it fades and the new screen is introduced with an overlay diamond effect.
These effects can be selected as a single fade throughout or Éallæ, where a different fade is used for each update. You can, of course, switch off the fade option if desired. The time between fades can be altered; some screens obviously take longer for the spectator to digest than others, especially if text is used. The display can be set to change automatically or manually. This will be a great help if your presentation is keyed to your speech and gives time for side tracking or dealing with questions. Using this feature, it is possible to step forwards and backwards using the mouse or icons on screen.
A presentation
A presentation is so easy to construct Ö I did not initially believe this was all I had to do. To construct a basic presentation, you drag your pictures into a directory, (files do not need to be squashed but they can be if you prefer), name your directory to fit your presentation for future reference, and then drag it onto the iconbar icon. The frames step through in alphanumeric order using the configurations set up as above Ö thatæs it!!
To top this, within the presentation directory make another directory called sounds. Put sound samples, again squashed, into this directory and name them the same as the associated picture. When the picture loads, so long as you have a sample player, like ÉSoundConæ by Rick Hudson, (FreeWare), you will hear the sound as well Ö impressive or what?
For the more adventurous, control can be via script files, which are also saved into your root presentation directory. These files are made up of some very simple commands and are very easy to construct using a text editor. This enables more precise control over the presentation.
At present, Portfolio can cater for the following filetypes:
Sprites, drawfiles, JPEG files, squashed sprites, squashed drawfiles, GIF files, PCX files, BMP files, RLE files, PhotoCD files and Armadeus sound files. (For PhotoCD, you will need to have Photoview loaded first. This should have been provided with your CD-ROM.)
Conclusion
Excellent, no hang ups, no crashes, easy to use, versatile and reasonably priced. Portfolio costs ú25 single user, ú25 primary school site licence, and ú29 secondary school site licence from WECC, but you have to add ú1 p&p and VAT to these prices.áuá
