The deed is done. I had the pre-lunchtime slot at Reboot to speak about a very simple subject: the hyperlink.
It was fun. People seemed to enjoy it and there were some great questions and comments afterwards: it was humbling and gratifying to have Håkon Wium Lie and Jean-Francois Groff respond to my words.
Unlike any previous presentations I’ve done, I had written out everything I wanted to say word for word. I began by describing this as a story, a manifesto, but mostly a love letter. For once, I was going to read a pre-prepared speech. I still had slides but they were very minimal.
I ended up using two laptops. One iBook, controlled from my phone using Salling Clicker, was displaying the slides done in Keynote. I used the other iBook as a teleprompter: I wanted large sized text continually scrolling as I spoke.
I looked into some autocue software for the Mac but rather than fork out the cash for one of them, I wrote my own little app using XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. I bashed out a quick’n’dirty first version pretty quickly. I spent most of the flight to Copenhagen refining the JavaScript to make it reasonably nice. I’ll post the code up somewhere, probably over on the DOM Scripting site in case anyone else needs a browser-based teleprompter.
If you’d like to read a regular, non-scrolling version of my love letter, I’ve posted In Praise of the Hyperlink in the articles section.