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REMIX

Eclipse-based tooling for creating presentations from re-usable modules. This solves the usual problem of clone-and-own of slide sets, which leads to inconsistencies, redundancies and a lot of wasted time.

After organizing your presentation library based on REMIX's features, you will be able to create a new presentation in the order of minutes (not in the order of hours and days as before).

Installation

You can install REMIX using an Eclipse Update site which is available on Google Drive. Just download the archive, start from an existing or fresh Eclipse installation and install remix via Help > Install new software... > Add... > Archive.... If an additional product needed by REMIX is missing in your Eclipse installation, Eclipse will either install it automatically or point you towards the missing products.

The installable product (update site) is also built by travis-ci. However, currently this product build is not publicly available. Build status: Build Status.

If you want to, the project can be built with maven. You then need an Eclipse development environment and the sources of REMIX (cloned from this github repository). Then just use the parent pom.xml in folder releng/org.nanosite.remix.parent and start a maven build from there. After a successful build, the ready-to-use product for your OS platform will be available in releng/org.nanosite.remix.product.

General idea

REMIX combines re-usable presentation parts (i.e., sets of slides, aka modules) to build complete presentations. It can be used for creating any type of presentation (even any kind of textual document), but it works best with reveal.js.

REMIX handles two kinds of files:

  • the actual presentation content (e.g., html-files for reveal.js)
  • REMIX-files (suffix rmx) for controlling the content and providing metadata

REMIX comes with a nice editor for working with REMIX-files (*.rmx). The REMIX language is described below.

REMIX language

The most important concepts of the REMIX language are module, collection and presentation.

Modules in REMIX

A module is the content atom in REMIX. It represents one file with presentation content (typically a html-file). A module has a name and specifies the file name of the content file it represents.

Collections in REMIX

A collection is a set of REMIX modules. It has a name and (optionally) a path specification for the folder where the modules are located. If the path specification is omitted, the modules are located in the same folder as the rmx-file which contains the collection section.

A collection can also be regarded as a common namespace for modules. All collections available in the Eclipse workspace constitute the library of available presentation modules. Some collections may be shared among groups of users (e.g., using a git infrastructure), other may be private.

Presentations in REMIX

A presentation represents an ordered combination of modules (stored in collections) together with some additional information. From a presentation, the REMIX generator will create the actual presentation in a target folder (see below).

REMIX offers a variety of features which are controlled using the presentation section:

  • structure your presentation with part sections (parts may get a title and an optional image)
  • create a summary with the overview keyword
  • change the look-and-feel of the presentation with the theme keyword
  • and some more (to be documented)

Hint: If your presentation is stored in one Eclipse project and it refers to a collection in another Eclipse project, don't forget to set a 'Project Reference' from the former to the latter in the project's properties.

REMIX generator

The REMIX generator is triggered when saving an rmx-file which contains a presentation section. The target folder for the generated presentation will be determined from the => attribute at the end of the presentation section. This might be a relative path (which is resolved relatively to the rmx-file's location) or an absolute path. At this target path, a further subfolder will be created which will be named like the presentation name.

The generator will collect the content files of all the presentation's modules into one resulting index.html. Additionally, it will collect the contents of the resources folder of each module into a common resources folder which is located beneath the index.html file. This mechanism can be used to handle images, additional javascript files, and many more.

Using REMIX with reveal.js

The example project org.nanosite.remix.revealjs shows how REMIX can be used to build reveal.js presentations. See the two examples in the models folder. Triggered by a save-action, a folder presentation-gen will be created in the root of the project which contains the presentation. In order to show the result as a reveal-HTML5-presentation, copy the content of a typical reveal.js-presentation into the same folder (i.e., at least the folders css, js and lib, but without overwriting index.html). Then open the index.html (generated by REMIX) in your browser (reveal.js works best with Google Chrome).