imclab / message

Simplest way to make presentations

Message - The simplest way to create presentations

message.fhtr.net

Message is the simplest way to create presentation slides.

Here's the ten-second tutorial:

Write the point for the slide and an add an illustration
http://poemyou.com/images/fhtr.png

Here's another slide with just the main point

http://poemyou.com/images/fhtr.png
(Speaker notes like this help you talk about slides with no text)

You can embed videos into your slides
http://youtu.be/-t8K4L6YJ6Q

And audio
http://open.spotify.com/track/2pnJ87yTVpkgtZh6Tq4vKh

And even tweets
https://twitter.com/ilmarihei/status/352789415925530624

Ok, good job! You're now ready to make great presentations!

As you edit your slides, Message saves your work every five seconds. You can also press cmd-s to force a save.

Message embeds YouTube and Vimeo video URLs, Spotify and Soundcloud audio URLs, Twitter tweets and URLs ending in .mp3, mp4, .jpg, .png and .gif.

Installation in three steps

First, you need MongoDB and Node.js.

Good, now your user authentication system is set up.

Second, install the dependencies and start the servers.

npm install
mongod --config mongod.config &
node app.js

Third, point your browser at http://localhost:3000

Federated authentication

If you want to use log in using GitHub, Facebook, Twitter or Google, you can uncomment the pertinent sections of config.js auth object. However, to use any of the providers, you need to set up an API app on each service.

Here's how you do it for GitHub authentication:

Go to GitHub > Account settings > Applications and create a new application called Message-Local. Copy the client ID and the client secret into the config.js file. The callback URL for the local app should be http://localhost:3000/auth/github/callback and the app URL can be http://localhost:3000. If you have deployed the app to a different server, you need to use the URLs to that.

Done. That wasn't too hard, eh?

Facebook: go to the Facebook Developers page and create a new app. Set up the app URLs like above.

Google: use the API Console to create a new app and switch on the Google+ API, then go to the API Access pane and set up your Client ID for web applications.

Twitter: go to the [Twitter Developers](https://dev.twitter.com/] page and create a new app. Twitter requires you to go to app settings and tick a "Sign in with Twitter" box to enable Twitter logins. It also pesters you to provide a public URL for the app, but you can leave that blank or point it to a different place.

Deploying to Heroku

The message.fhtr.net app runs on Heroku and uses MongoHQ for the database.

Likewise, you can deploy your copy of the app to Heroku without much trouble.

First, you need to edit config.js and make mongodb_server point to a public MongoDB server.

# Then create the Heroku app.
heroku create

# Set up the auth callback server.
# Remember to create a GitHub app to point to this new URL.
heroku config:set AUTH_SERVER=http://your_heroku_app.herokuapp.com

# Deploy the app to Heroku.
git push heroku master:master

Ok, you're good to go!

Deploying a production version

If you want to switch NODE_ENV to production, you need to edit index.dot and change the CDN to point to your own CDN.

To create the compiled build files, run bin/build.sh. The build script compiles JavaScript and CSS into bundles and places them in build/. To run the production version of the app, you should then copy the bundle files over to your own CDN server.

The bundle filenames are set to the MD5 hash of the bundle contents, so you can set the bundle file Expires-headers to a far-future date.

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2013 Ilmari Heikkinen

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.