Presentation - draft site intro

[webfork]

So I put together a presentation I'd like to add to the site as part of our About page and I need your help. This is a rough draft and will likely see lots of changes, hopefully with many of the visible words being spoken in a video rather than written on the slide. I'll also try to add some some quality images and animation.

Download: You can view the file in PDF format, but you can also see the original (ODP). The file is licensed Creative Commons BY-SA. If anyone is willing or available, please look through what I've put together here in your PDF viewer, LibreOffice, PowerPoint, etc. and give me your feedback.

Background: I've tried a few different efforts to introduce visitors to the site and the concepts here, but I always fell short. At the same time, I've been to many events over the years where someone stood up in front of people to describe their project and its importance, yet I'd never tried to capture this in my work. Fortunately, I had a brainstorm a few weeks ago about one way to finally tackle this: focus on the management of customizations and settings.

Tools used: I wrote this up with LibreOffice, but I need to give a big thumbs up to Marp for helping me get out of the woods on the concept. Just typing away and separating slides with a "---" got me out of a very long creative funk.

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Related

• Intro to PortableFreeware.com
• Developer tool: Use Cases for portability (Agile)
• An introduction to freeware (article)

[SYSTEM]

The presentation looks good to me.

You could mention that in addition to not needing to insert settings on every PC, with portable software you also don't need to install your favorite programs on every PC you use. They are already there on your external drive.

[Midas]

Great work.

I'd touch the formulation here and there but nothing big or important. Just one issue with the main focus on settings portability: from where I stand, it's rather means to an end.

Let me try to make it clearer. Often, programs give users different levels of oversight over the data they generate -- not every one is a document processor where the location of data files is granted and considered valuable.

E.g., look at some note taking apps that store data in some kind of database format and, not being portable, save that data to '%APPDATA%'.

A user is liable to spend some time or even years feeding them and after some system change or, worse, mishap, find oneself back to square one with zero data. I'd argue that the majority of programs don't really differentiate between settings and user data.

Some developers will answer that the option for data backup was there all along but that's relying on user training, which is precisely one thing that can't be taken for granted.

Personally, I arrived at portability from that quadrant when I realized that data independence from processing tools was a goal in itself.

In the best case scenario, if you use portable programs you always know where your data is, i.e., somewhere inside the program folder... archive that and you're golden.

[Andrew Lee]

I have provided a link to the ODP slideshow in the About page. Hopefully with more feedback, this will become the goto guide for folks interested in portable freeware on the Internet!

[webfork]

I have provided a link to the ODP slideshow in the About page. Hopefully with more feedback, this will become the goto guide for folks interested in portable freeware on the Internet!

This is very much a very basic draft, but thanks for the vote of confidence. I hope to have something a little more polished in the coming weeks.

Also, I forgot to add a thanks to user mimik who inspired me to finally tackle this.

[webfork]

While I meant to do more of a friendly, graphical view, I did a content update to the site intro. Some of the ideas still felt a bit rough.

A user is liable to spend some time or even years feeding them and after some system change or, worse, mishap, find oneself back to square one with zero data. I'd argue that the majority of programs don't really differentiate between settings and user data.

This idea actually gave me the most pause. I've been trying to integrate it into the overall narrative but for the moment I just added a slide to the backup set. I'm struggling because not all programs here on the site have a natural functionality to save everything to the local folder, just most. But you couldn't be more right about some critical file getting saved to AppData that no one would know to backup and would get lost on drive failure.

[Midas]

Here's a personal anecdote to illustrate the idea: on a professional level, I have had to deal with some really old school bibliographic management software originally provided by Unesco.

While it uses some kind of "textual flat-file" database format that is highly prone to corruption and absolutely reviled by IT pros, it was built from the ground up to keep software and data strongly isolated -- and we're talking here of some solution originating in the seventies, i.e., pre-dating the advent of PCs.

Over the years, different versions came and went, residing on different OSes even -- anyone remembers vanilla Unix workstations? -- and the underlying data just more or less sailed through and is still used in the present day. Now, how many of your old word-processor files can do the same?

[webfork]

... how many of your old word-processor files can do the same?

That is frustratingly true.

For a good chunk of time I considered doing a site intro this from the point of view of how many systems throw files all over the place without any discipline. On the flip side, IOS has no file manager, only recently adding one after years of better programs being almost mandatory downloads for serious users.

Anyway, I pushed another edit up. Feedback welcome. This may look a little basic, but I was determined to use only freeware tools, so it lacks some of the polish that a more intense process would generate. Maybe I'll break down and use some more advanced tools to bring a clearer intro.

[bitcoin]

good idea

[webfork]

So the site intro presentation didn't look quite right before with the format in ODP (Open Document Presentation) format. This is basically to do with the Zoho Office program's ODP viewer, which is very basic. Anyway, with my most recent updates and added complexity, the simple viewer service is even more off the mark.

Please instead view the PDF file unless you can download and open the original ODP in LibreOffice. (Note that PowerPoint 2010 and above claim to support this format, but don't bother as their ODP viewer is somehow even worse.)

Preview of the first 3 slides:

[mimik]

Hallo all together,

first of all: GREAT WORK, Mr. Webfork!!! I like your "settings-approach" to explain the topic and overall your presentation is not overhelming people new to the topic with thousends of terms. Good done!
Second point: "Also, I forgot to add a thanks to user mimik who inspired me to finally tackle this." Thanks for remembering my friend, but it's not necessery. You allready said "Thank you", just found your message in my INBOX.
Last Point: What a great community!!! Keep going on!!!

[webfork]

GREAT WORK, Mr. Webfork!!! I like your "settings-approach" to explain the topic and overall your presentation is not overhelming people new to the topic with thousends of terms. Good done!

It feels good to hear that. I have several other ideas that I want to dig into both on and connected to the site intro -- hopefully I can get the bandwidth to finally start building. Thanks for the encouragement.

[Midas]

Had forgotten about this, too. Great work.

[webfork]

I'm hoping to have a video version of the site intro before November, but wanted to point out not-recent but still good introduction by Majorgeeks:

https://www.majorgeeks.com/content/page ... _them.html

... I especially liked #4 on the list discussing unwanted startup items, something that I think I left off my own arguments for portability.