Automated Development of Presentation with Interactivity

Question

I am trying to identify the right tool, language, software package, or other for the automated development of presentations, where the presentation is user interactive.

The presentation will consist of images with titles and some descriptive text. Most of the time there will be 35–70 images. I would like to show each image on a separate page, slide, tab, etc. (I guess proper terminology depends on the solution.)

The images will change, but the titles will remain the same, and there will be a little bit of change to the description of each image.

After putting the presentation together, I would like the user to be able to circle and "write" on the electronic image in kind of the wax pencil sense (I previously worked in a photo lab and we worked with wax pencils on negatives all the time and would like to have kind of a similar flexibility). Moreover, I would like users to be able to add comments as well, kind of in the way Adobe PDF Professional allows, e.g. inserting bubble comments, etc.

Most importantly, I would like to be able to do this in an automated way. Right now we are using PowerPoint, but the amount of time it is taking to put an image on a slide in PowerPoint, resize it, and then set up the text is killing us. Plus, as the images change it takes tons of time to go back and update them. Thus, we would like something that is a bit faster to update images and get the feedback from our few users. Does not necessarily have to be a web hosted solution, but could be run through a browser.

Sorry this is so long and thanks for any ideas and feedback, especially if there is an existing software package solution, language that can be used, or other approach to get this done.

Answer 1

I don't know of any product that completely answers your requirements.

But, for similar results I use two different tools for developing the presentations and another one for drawing while presenting.

If I just want to make a presentation made of pictures and texts, and I want to automate its creation, I use irfanview http://www.irfanview.com/ with its wonderful feature for automated slideshows. I put all the images together, annotate them (I use either their filenames, or if not enought, with EXIF and comment fields) and create a slideshow, that can be compiler into an .exe file.

If I want a more elaborated presentation. With full annotation capabilities, I use Wink http://www.debugmode.com/wink/

For drawing over the screen during the presentation, I use a very old bitmap drawing program, called PC-Draw, that allows, with a hotkey, to capture the screen as a bitmap and begin drawing over it, and with another hotkey, to return to the original screen without altering the running programs at all. I have not found it anywhere in the web. However, I found similar programs just a quick google away.

All three tools are free and easy (and even fun) to use.