Tech Talk PSE home page and downloads
Tech Talk PSE is technical demonstration software which doesn’t suck. It uses Mozilla’s rendering engine to display slides, so it’s easy to use (just write HTML) and powerful. And you can intersperse your talk with shell scripts to run demonstrations.
New in version 1.0.0 is a menu that lets you jump straight to different parts of your talk and take screenshots:
Here is a talk I gave at GLLUG using Tech Talk PSE.
I think that Tech Talk PSE may be one of the best programs I’ve ever written. Let’s compare it to “OpenOffice Impress”:
| OpenOffice | Tech Talk PSE | |
|---|---|---|
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Play videos | Yes | Yes |
| Open a shell during a talk | No | Yes |
| Use your own editor | No | Yes |
| Induces RSI during use | Mouse-controlled | Keyboard-controlled |
| Lines of code | 109 (approx) | 850 |
| Comes in Platinum edition | No | Yes |
It’s better than OpenOffice on any measure. Yet even if you include all the autoconf, documentation and examples, it’s only 1 kLoC and was written over 3 days in my spare time. For giving technical demonstrations, it’s totally “Right”, where OpenOffice is basically “Wrong”.
Richard WM Jones 
Can I embed a video? To me, this is the first minimal feature required for a presentation suite to be useful. Openoffice has been at it for years, and I still cannot easily and reliably embed a video in a presentation.
Sure. It’s just HTML, embed a video using the <embed> tag. Or if you’re sure the venue will have internet access, put a YouTube video in.
Edit: Basically you can do anything in Tech Talk PSE that you can do in Firefox. It uses the same rendering engine. So you want to animate the page using Javascript, use <blink>, respond to mouseovers or clicks, access websites (if you have internet), …
Hi,
I’ve compiled the sources and when executing it, the texts on the “Next/Previous slide” buttons are not apperaing. The up right menu is OK.
http://yfrog.com/jktechtalknotextsp
I’m using an Spanish language desktop… and the first screen buttons are localized into Spanish (License, About, Close).
Any errors/warnings? Which versions of Gtk etc?
I’m experiencing that too. I’m using Ubuntu 9.10.
libgtk2-mozembed-perl 0.08-2ubuntu0.xul191ubuntu1
libgtk2-perl 1:1.221-4
No output on console whatsoever. How can we get debugging output?
I wonder if it’s a localization thing. Can you try it with:
No, that’s not it. I tried using both:
export LANG=C
techtalk-pse
and
LANG=C techtalk-pse
No good. đŸ˜¦ The menu strings are correctly shown: First slide, Last slide, Slides », Take a screenshot, Quit.
Hi,
I have packaged it
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/ramezhanna/Fedora_12/
feel free to download or send patches to the spec file
BR
RH
Thanks Ramez.