Audience Interaction ↑

Showoff has a number of features for interacting with your audience. These features work with all modern browsers, even with Internet Explorer from 2+ years ago!

Viewer Functionality ↑

There are several ways that the audience can interact with you and the presentation. If there is a connection problem making this interaction unusable, the controls will be disabled and a disconnected icon will appear in the lower left.

Presentation Control ↑

Navigation

Pressing the left and right arrow keys, or the spacebar will cause the presentation to change slides.

Follow Mode

Pressing g will switch the viewer's presentation into follow mode. This means that each time the presenter switches slides, the viewer's presentation will follow along and switch to the same slide.

Presentation Feedback ↑

The viewer will see a vertical grippy handle along the left side of the window. If they move their mouse pointer over this handle, the Feedback Panel will appear, exposing several control widgets.

To enable this functionality, please set the key "feedback": true in your showoff.json files.

Live Interaction ↑

Provide Pace Feedback

The viewer will have two buttons to click, Slow Down and Speed Up. Each time a button is clicked, a message is sent to the presenter to help them adjust their delivery pace appropriately.

Ask a Question

If the audience is large, the viewer is remote, or just doesn't want to ask in front of peers, a question can be typed into this box and will appear in the presenter's display control panel.

Material Feedback ↑

Provide Slide Feedback

The viewer can rate a slide, from awful to awesome, and provide a bit of free text explaining what could be made better on any given slide. The feedback and the current slide name are recorded on the presenter's machine for later analysis.

Code Review ↑

Edit Current Slide

If the showoff.json file contains an edit key and showoff is called with the --review command line flag then this button will appear, allowing audience members with sufficient privileges to edit the source of the current slide using an online editor at the configured location. This is most useful when your slide source is stored in GitHub, or another repository that allows interactive editing. This functionality is intended for periodic materials review sessions.

Presenter Functionality ↑

The presentation control panel provides many tools for interacting with your audience. They are summarized here. This information exists in greater detail in the USAGE document.

If there is a connection problem making interaction with your audience unusable, a disconnected icon will appear in the top right of the presentation preview.

Pace Feedback Gauge

When the audience provides pace feedback for you, it will appear on this gauge. You should aim to keep the gauge near the center. The left side indicates that you are moving too slowly and the right side is too fast. The feedback messages decay over time and will expire in about five minutes–meaning that the gauge will move back towards the center.

Update Follower

Allow viewers in Follow Mode to track your progress.

Enable Remote

Allow remote windows, including mobile devices, to control the presentation by opening the presenter view.

Audience Questions

When an audience member uses the anonymous Ask Question feature, it will appear in this list. The questions are listed in reverse order, with the newest at the top.

Log Files ↑

viewstats.json

Each time Showoff starts, it truncates and creates a new statistics log file. This file records time that audience members spent looking at any one given slide. Only time that is greater than one second is recorded, and only when the viewer is not in follow mode.

feedback.json

This log file is appended to each time an audience member has feedback for the material. It should be reviewed on a regular basis–or better, consumed by an automatic process–for important information on whether your material is having the desired impact on your audience.

This file contains a rating and a free text feedback field. It is keyed by the slide name, so you can easily collate information grouped by slide name.