powerpoint+flash interaction

One of the cool things I learned about Powerpoint the other day is that it’s possible to create interactions between an embedded Flash movie and the presentation itself.  This allows you to coordinate animations across the movie and the slide, e.g. to have a mouse click sometimes advance the slide and sometimes trigger some action in the movie.

The reason all this works is because you can do function calls up from the Flash movie, through the ActiveX container and into VBA code attached to the Powerpoint presentation.   You can also call down from Powerpoint into Flash in a similar manner, though I haven’t experimented with this.

DMP ASPLOS presentation README

Here are some instructions to help you run the presentation I gave on Deterministic Shared Memory Multiprocessing at ASPLOS 2009.  The presentation itself can be downloaded here.  This presentation uses Shockwave Flash movies embedded in Powerpoint, and interaction between the two, so there are a few steps you have to go through to get everything to work right.

Installing Adobe Flash Player 10 ActiveX Control

Here’s how I got the Adobe Flash Player 10 ActiveX Control to install under Windows Vista, so I could embed Flash movies in Powerpoint.

1. Go to the Flash Player download site.  Download the “Adobe Flash Player 10 Update for Flash CS4 Professional” zipfile – 44MB.
2. Unzip the archive somewhere, and go to the Players/Release/ directory.
3. You’ll find an executable named Install Flash Player 10 ActiveX.exe, which will do just what the name says!

This is kind of convoluted; maybe people have found easier ways?

Powerpoint + Flash = Awesome (eventually)

I recently attended ASPLOS 2009 in Washington, D.C., and put together some slides for the presentation I gave on Deterministic Shared Memory Multiprocessing. To appease my endless thirst for new technologies, I figured I’d try using Powerpoint with embedded Shockwave Flash movies for the presentation, instead of the traditional vanilla-Powerpoint. Why bother making my life so complicated? Well, there were 5 main reasons.