I had an idea recently that I probably won’t be able to work out, so I’m just gonna throw it here and see if anyone feels like putting the nuts and bolts together.
It’s about step-by-step wizards (i.e. the “Next-Next-Finish” idea). Please follow my thought process:
(a) I’ve made a pretty popular wizard for podcasting with Blogger and Smartcast one year ago; (b) I also have been following Jon Udell’s efforts with screencasting (and also more on mastuvu.typepad.com) and (c) I recently have made a project based on photofeeds.
Well now, eventhough I am wary of seeing everything as a nail just because I have the RSS hammer, I think there is a nice synergy possible.
Imagine a generic wizard visualizer. It takes as input an RSS feed and considers each of the RSS items to be a step in the wizard process. It then shows each step in a userfriendly way: either as a kind of slideshow, with “next” and “previous” button, or as a timeline, with zoom-in on a specific step if you click on it, or … All AJAX, CSS and multimedia wizardry is possible. That is purely a presentation-layer issue. Once the wizard content is made, the rest is make-up.
Some examples/remarks:
- think of a “photofeed” wizard: an image is shown for each step, with some HTML text underneath.You could zoom in on the picture. I have made a demo of such a feed on wizarss.blogspot.com and a stub of what such a generic wizard visualizer could look like: WizaRSS stub.
- think of a “podcast” wizard: for each step, there is an audio clip of 10-60 seconds explaining in simple terms what should be done (with a small Flash MP3 player in the page).
- think of a “screencast” wizard: for each step the screencast is shown to make things more tangible.
- another type of visualizer could convert the RSS to a SMIL or ASX multimedia playlist.
- a good wizard player would have templates, or customizable CSS stylesheets
- anyone could make a nice wizard with Blogger (and Feedburner SmartCast). Like: recipees, how-to-repair-your-bicycle, bonsai-101, …
- since RSS is reverse chronological, the last step is listed as most recent, so as the first item in the feed
All feedback is welcome!
Update: Pascal already has a WizaRSS Powerpoint-like S5 presentation player!
PS: I create a new blog on Blogger, and within 15 minutes I have a comment spammer. Some morons scraping the “Recently Updated” on the Blogger homepage?
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What about http://pascal.vanhecke.info/wp-content/upload_files/wizaRSS_S5/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwizarss.blogspot.com%2Fatom.xml ?
More at http://pascal.vanhecke.info/2005/09/28/visualising-rss-playing-with-wizarss-and-s5/
Some remarks:
1) a real wizard does not always work purely sequential: it can have a decision tree where the path is determined by answers to questions.
2) the internal structure of a ‘wizard page’ is of more importance than the sequential sequence of the pages. RSS itself has a rather limited and fixed structure (link/title/description/category etc), if you need more you have to rely on HTML and CSS inside the description. IMHO for creating wizards you need a specific XML vocabulary rather than the RSS spec
3) A wizard is not the same thing as a tutorial. WizaRSS is probably better for creating tutorials than for creating wizards.
I forgot to say this only makes sense for wizards that SHOW something – not for wizards that DO something (install software, parse some XML, …), which probably means a better name for them would be a “tutorial”.
So you’re right, Luc.
How about this proof of concept slideshow, which allows you to stop through bookmarked sites on delicious.
deiShow