Howdy folks. Yesterday, I announced that I had begun working on a dohickey called ‘S7′. In this annoucement, I discoursed on my inspiration for S7 and the renderer I had completed, yet gave barely any detail on the S7 Creator GUI I have in mind. I wish to fix this.

In my mind, the S7 Creator will be a web application that will be accomodating of users working together on the same slideshow, at the same time. This will sort of take a [controlled] wiki approach; anyone who is ‘on the project’ can add, delete, edit, and re-order slides and content items on those slides. Now, that does not mean that single users will not find S7 to be useful, because you can still create slideshows on your own.

You might be wondering, why would anyone want to work together on a slideshow? What niche does this fill?

Highschools, for one. It seems as if it is some kind of status symbol for highschool teachers to get everything from their students in slideshow format. Group projects, however, throw a mitersaw into this plan - students can’t crowd around one computer and be adding six slides at once, all together. PowerPoint is built for one user editing a show at a time. A stupid limitation, I know, but PowerPoint isn’t Web 2.0 hip. [Yes, yes, the second Web 2.0 reference this week. If you want my address so you can come and beat me with a 2×4, just ask.]

Now, on paper this sounds like a nifty idea. In practice, it’s a fucking pain in the ass to implement. I need to determine how to establish locks on content, so users don’t step on each other’s toes. I’ve pondered it, and I only have one area in which I am not sure as to the most effective locking procedure. But this is for me to worry about, unless you want to get involved.

A user can share presentations with people, or set them as private. A gallery of presentations with the most views will be available, as will other charts. If bloggers can spend all day writing posts about taking a nap, maybe people will make slideshows about it, too.

S7 Creator is going to use a lot of AJAX and DHTML-ish tricks to make the creation of slideshows painless. I have a bunch of sketches of add screens that take only one or two clicks to add and organize content. It’ll be hot.

So yeah.