There are two modes of operation for this system.
Presentation Preparation mode, and Presentation Viewer mode.
In Presentation Preparation mode, the user develops a presentation, which is a set of images, and a set of gestures, by selecting images to load, and dragging gestures into position.
In Presentation Viewer mode, the images and gestures are loaded and positioned as prepared.
This framed document has a top frame, called the menu, and a bottom frame, called the content.
The
The controls in the menu frame are broken up into 3 columns.
The left column is a table with a bunch of gesture controls, within a table, of four rows. See below for more information.
The middle column has an upper part used for specifing an image, with an optional separator lable, and an action button of the "+" icon, which adds the image to the presentation.
The middle column has a lower part which displays the current set of images and gestures in their respective textarea form fields. On startup, these textarea form fields are loaded from cookie values which can be set either from the actions of building the presentation, or initialized by the web serve when viewing a presentation.
The right column is an iframe containing a menu culled form the www.dafyomi.org web site to help to facilitate loading E-Daf images. Choosing the tractate and page, and clicking the icon, loads an image URL into the form field for the middle column.
The top row is used for adding a text overlay. The left half is a
textarea form field which can take a multi-line input of the text
to be displayed.
To the right is a button which when clicked actually
adds the text overlay to the content frame. It is helpful to already
have placed a highlight gesture at the spot where the text overlay is
to be positioned.
The third row is an assortment of arrows which may be useful to point to words or markings from a variety of angles.
The fourth row is an assortment of control buttons.
The red floppy disk icon comes to save the current gesture state to the gestures textarea, and the gestures cookie as well.
The file folder icon comes to load the current gesture state from the gestures textarea.
The rolodex icon comes load the set of images with optional titles from the images textarea.
The "Web Save" icon submits the form, with the image and gesture state textareas, to the web server, which saves it as a file for viewers to load. The web server's processing function for this feature also sets the cookie based on the state, and so does loading the "cookiejar" file it prepares.
The "Clear State" icon clears the cookie.
The "Help" link brings up this page in the content frame, which can be reversed by the link at the bottom.
Coming soon we hope to have a way for a presentation viewer to use the same gesture mechanism to ask a question on the presentation as an additional set of gestures for the presenter to load and then address the question, and other viewers may or may not want to load the additional gestures. For the time being, a viewer who gestures a question can simply cut and paste their gesture state lines from the gesture area to the presenter through an instant messaging system or email.
When viewing a presentation a user might be given a complex URL with the textarea form fields encoded into GET method, or might be given a URL to cookiejar file saved to the web server through the presenter's Web Save feature, which may need to be submitted back to the web server.
Either way, the web server URL will process the image list and gesture list parameters form fields into a cookie, so that when the presentation system URL is loaded, it will have useful data to preload.
If a user comes to the presentation URL directly, and the cookie was already set previously, then the prior presentation will be loaded. But if the cookie had been cleared, or if it was never loaded, then a blank presentation is loaded.
Our new javascript presentation-only mode is generated at the same time a cookiejar file is written out but uses no cookies, instead the output is an HTML file which references a javascript library and makes calls into the library to place each image and gesture. This mode has no GUI for placing additional gestures or making other permanent changes to the presentation.
When a gesture is clicked in the menu frame, a copy of it appears in the upper left of the visible region of the content frame.
This copy can be dragged to any position in the content window. The window will scroll as necessary to accomodate dragging it.
The copy can also be resized by holding the shift key when dragging the mouse.
Note: the dragging only works to the right side and down, so if placing a highlighter on top of Hebrew right-to-left text, place it aligned with the left edge of the text column, and adjust the right side.
Walter Zorn makes a public DHTML dynamic HTML javascript library which is heavily used by this project.
Many others, including my family, who have put up with my absence while working on this system, and my online chaverim with whom I have often discussed my desire to utilize technology for Torah learning purposes likely hinged upon having a lightweight whiteboard mechanism which would be suitable for cutting and pasting through an instant messaging system alongside Voice over IP or telephone learning.
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