Summary	A very simple presentation program
Categories	None
License	Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) License
Owner(s)	jag

Note: The currently checked in sources are once again buildable, and it auto-configures to deal with whether or not jogl and xith are installed. The OSX installer and .jar downloads are correct, but the jnlp file appears to be somewhat broken. I'm having a hard time debugging this since WebStart on OS X keeps crashing on me.

Huckster: a Very Simple Presentation Tool

Huckster is a simple program for doing presentations, performing a function somewhat akin to PowerPoint, but with much less hassle.

• To get a demo, look here.
• To install it on Mac OSX, look here.
• To get a cross-platform, Java5 executable, look here.
• There is some basic documentation here.
• To get the sources, click the "Source code" link on the left side of the page.

The current release is solid enough for me to use in day-to-day life, but I wouldn't call it industrial-strength.

Principles

Huckster diverges from the way other presentation programs work based on a few principles:

1. Life's to short to spend it fussing with formatting. This program handles the formatting for you. If you don't like the way it formats things, use StarOffice or Powerpoint.
2. If you type a character into a slide, it should appear on the slide. Nothing silently drops off the bottom of a slide: As you type more text into a slide, text point sizes are progressively reduced.
3. Most folks serious about putting together good looking slides use industrial strength art tools from companies like Adobe and Corel. Therefore, this presetation program has no art tools of its own and presumes that you'll use one of these other tools and drag-and-drop images into the presentation.
4. Content and Style should be seperated as totally as possible.
5. Transitions are evil.

Caveats

Huckster was never intended to be a generalized Presentation tool. It's organized around a rapid workflow that fits the way I work when I'm on the road giving lots of presentations, cobbling up new ones frequently. If you want to put together carefully crafted presentations, you're likely to be unhappy with Huckster. If you're looking for a full featured presentation program, check out OpenOffice.

Joining the Project

If you'd like to grab the source files and have some fun, please join as an Observer. This will allow you to check out files and do all the building and editing you want. If you decide you've done something cool that you'd like to integrate back in to the source, send me some email and we can talk about making you a Developer.