Here are some notes on the WBO or White Board Java Object as basis of a 
Presentation system.

Differences/Improvements to PowerPoint/Persuasion
1) Need a "highlight" brush, which is specified by a given color, font and font 
size. On invoking such a brush, any selected text will take on characteristics 
of brush. In say PowerPoint, you have to select text and then color, font etc. 
separately. Marek and I find this clumsy for such a common need.
It would be useful to be able to define more than one such brush (text 
characteristics) which one can move between.
2) As discussed with Tomas, we need to define a type of box, which contains 
text, and as you change box size, the font size of text changes automatically to 
fit into box. If text has multiple "default" sizes, the one should roughly 
preserve size differential proportionally. This scaling box should be useable in 
both master template and in boxes used in foil outside basic text imported into 
master boxes.
I think that in PowerPoint/Persuasion, the template (master) box determines 
width and top left hand corner of text. This is not so useful in my opinion as 
scaling option.

More General Points
3) One can use WBO's for both new and old presentations. Latter case has 
interesting feature that we can use our existing online foils to create quickly a 
rich set of material in the WBO format. Initially we can just import text 
version of foils into WBO and note that we preserve in WebWisdom a pointer 
indicating if image version has essential information not present in saved text 
from PowerPoint or Persuasion outline. If we are success, we will want to 
convert data more precisely, which implies an editing system with new WBO 
foil and old image version available to editor. One would need to use highlight 
option to change color of parts of text and "cut and paste" parts of original 
image containing pictures. In some cases on will redraw images rather than 
cutting and pasting. If such an editing system was developed, one could 
perhaps hire university students to do this tedious job. 
4) Each foil should presumably become a JavaBean with a suitable set of access 
methods. "Smaller" and "larger" beans can be found respectively in visual 
objects inside foil, foilsets and foilsets grouped into topic area. The current 
WebWisdom defines rather well many of the necessary properties of the 
beans. Presumably current white board also defines many of the necessary 
properties internal to a foil. How does current White board interact with bean 
box for WBO's? Are they essentially the same?
5) Note that converting existing WebWisdom material will give over 15,000 foil 
objects (beans) and many more if you include component and derived objects. 
These will allow interesting Corba experiments.
6) There are presumably many ways of storing these foil objects and allowing 
access to them. We will probably want to preserve existing (non WBO) 
capabilities as WBO system will initially be experimental and may for some 
time be slower than current less sophisticated technology. The WBO will 
interface with Meryem's play list capability and this should perhaps be closely 
integrated with WBO. The 15000 WBO objects could be accessed through a 
custom Java applet/application, which is basically some variant of current 
white board. We should probably have a database front-end that is "core" 
database of WebWisdom. This database should include usual metadata (foilset 
title, date etc.) as well as text of foil and pointer to associated WBO object 
stored in some conventional fashion (as defined in Corba, serialized Java 
object etc.). The database and not repository of WBO's will be used for 
conventional (full-text) searches to find particular foils.