What is Plainview?
Plainview is a full-screen web browser.
That’s it?
Well, it does a few other things – but yeah, basically that’s it.
Why is this useful?
We Barbarians give a lot of presentations. A lot of speeches. A lot of Dog and Pony shows. People want to see our work. And the work we do is on the Internet. And, until now, we really had two options for showing our Internet work: we could capture it all to Quicktime, and throw it into Powerpoint or Keynote, so we could present in a nice full-screen mode that looked professional, or we could try to show it in the browser, and have all that ugly chrome distracting people from our beautiful sites. Both of these options had their pros and cons – full-screen looks sweet, but you lose the interactivity of the site, everything has to be canned. And showing things in a browser lets you show the site’s interactivity, but, again, that ugly chrome.
So now we have a third option. Fire up your full-screen browser and let your audience focus on the work.
Also, we’re an Internet company! We have all these people here who can use Flash and make HTML presentations and do cool things with video. But we do NOT have a bunch of people who make really great looking Powerpoint presentations. Now we can do our presentations with the tools we are comfortable with, and have them look just as awesome as PowerPoint. Well, actually, a whole lot more awesome.
What else does Plainview do?
Plainview has a presentation mode – so you can build a presentation of, say, 10 sites you’ve built, and then show them one by one. Skip to the next site by hitting a hot key. We use this a lot for our Dog and Pony shows. We fire up one site we’ve done. Browse around. Show it. Time to move on? Skip to the next site, without opening up a location bar. Seamless, beautiful presentations.
You can also save presentations, add bookmarks, import your bookmarks, exit full-screen mode, open multiple windows, and view Quicktime movies. And check out the slick way we manage popups!
What are Plainview’s System Requirements?Plainview runs in Mac
OS X 10.4 or later. If you are on a PC, consider using
Firefox, which includes full screen functionality in its PC version, though not in its Mac version.
How did you make Plainview?
Plainview is a Mac OS X Cocoa app that uses WebKit. We spoke at WWDC last year about building Cocoa applications using WebKit, so we figured we’d better release one. As big Mac nerds, we’ve been messing around with Cocoa for quite some time, and what with that whole iPhone thing and all, our interest was heightened even more.
Can Plainview run in locked “kiosk” mode?
Yes. Type command-/ and plainview asks for an administrator password and then runs in kiosk mode. Instant kiosk!
How much does Plainview cost?
Plainview is free. Enjoy.
Really?
Yup.
How do I make a presentation? How do I add sites and pages to my presentation?
Open up the bookmarks or history panel, along with the presentation panel. Drag URLs from the bookmarks and history panel into the presentation panel. That’s the order of websites. Then you can rearrange the order, save the pres, etc.
