In my school there is a big flat screen monitor being displayed into the hallways that is going to waste. The school wants to see some real time information along with some power presentations. Something like maybe information from an rss feed marqueeing along the bottom with a pst file or flash playing towards the top.
Any ideas on how this could implemented?
Thanks guys!
I've done this before with HTML and JavaScript - turning off the browser chrome and putting it in kiosk mode. I had an airport terminal page in DHTML and just scrolled the page through JavaScript with a timer and the .scrollIntoView method on table rows.
If you have appropriate skills available team you could do everything in Flash.
I would however go for a simple HTML+AJAX web application running on a APM (Apache/PHP/MySQL) platform. You could easily change the design and functionality of such dashboard without having to maintain the Flash application.
If you will use good libraries like JQuery you could get most of the components for the page you want off internet without having to invest too much time in development.
For PowerPoint your best option seems to export the file to the HTML and display it an IFRAME or equivalent. Alternatively you could export to a bunch of pictures and use a slideshow component to display them in the loop
Well it depends on your goal. You want to learn to program or do you just need to use the pretty monitor. If you just want to fill it will cool stuff, check out Yahoo Widgets. There are tons of ready-to-go widgets that will do things that you've asked for, like crawls of RSS feeds. And if you want to do some coding you can just use the Widget framework to build your own.
use the marquee tag! finally, a use for it. you can use javascript to change the contents of the tag.
(community owned because of the fallout that will be incurred by the mention of the marquee tag)
Silverlight is another option is you want to use a browser. Otherwise, a nice desktop app running a WPF UI with good use of databinding would be a good programming exercise. You would also have to write the app to update the database, but it could all be data-driven. As Ilya Kochetov mentions in another answer, you would then have an app to maintain. But with proper separation, you could swap out "themes" fairly easily.
Microsoft's Grava is another option. It's geared towards education. MS may hate me for saying this, but think of really souped-up Power Point (although it is much more powerful than that - see the link). It is primarily for interactive use, not so much as a "slideshow" but you may be able to make it work. In addition, the SDK should allow you to write those dynamic data hooks you would need. The authoring environment would allow teachers and students to author presentations without having to know software development.
Also, Grava is not fully released yet (as of this writing, it's in CTP 3) and you must sign up for the CTP.
So, some of these limitations mean it may not be the best solution for you - but it remains one option to consider.