Tech Talk PSE home page and downloads

Tech Talk PSE is technical demonstration software which doesn’t suck. It uses Mozilla’s rendering engine to display slides, so it’s easy to use (just write HTML) and powerful. And you can intersperse your talk with shell scripts to run demonstrations.

New in version 1.0.0 is a menu that lets you jump straight to different parts of your talk and take screenshots:

Here is a talk I gave at GLLUG using Tech Talk PSE.

I think that Tech Talk PSE may be one of the best programs I’ve ever written. Let’s compare it to “OpenOffice Impress”:

OpenOffice Tech Talk PSE Open source Yes Yes Play videos Yes Yes Open a shell during a talk No Yes Use your own editor No Yes Induces RSI during use Mouse-controlled Keyboard-controlled Lines of code 109 (approx) 850 Comes in Platinum edition No Yes

It’s better than OpenOffice on any measure. Yet even if you include all the autoconf, documentation and examples, it’s only 1 kLoC and was written over 3 days in my spare time. For giving technical demonstrations, it’s totally “Right”, where OpenOffice is basically “Wrong”.