I was doing a bit of research on a potential project when I stumbled across faint, a Java facial recognition library and decided to give it a quick try.

The bad news is that the documentation is literally non-existent. So I did a bit of poking around the Jar and quickly found an 'OpenCVDetection' class. I dropped the faint Jar in my class path, restarted CF and about 5 minutes and 14 lines of code later I got the following result:

This is the third post in a series of posts introducing the SlideSix Presenter destkop application.  In this post we'll look at the navigating the notes and slides panels as well as how you can use the Twitter panel to monitor a backchannel while presenting.  We will also see how to broadcast live video and participate in a real-time chat session with your audience.

In this entry we'll start to take a look at the various 'panels' within the SlideSix Presenter desktop application.

I thought it might be helpful to start a short series of posts showing how to use the SlideSix Presenter desktop application. Most of the content in these posts will be coming directly from the user guide, but I'll break them up in to small chunks so they're easier to digest then the complete 24-odd page guide. Today I'll give a small intro, talk about logging in and then show some basic navigation.

I'm thrilled to announce the public beta launch of the SlideSix Presenter desktop application.  The SlideSix Presenter gives SlideSix users the ability to present materials to both a live and virtual audience at the same time.  That means that you can use the application to present your material just as you would with your legacy slideware program (including support for multiple monitors/displays), but in addition to all of the legacy slideware features you can simultaneously broadcast a your slides and a live video stream and interact with your virtual audience via real time text based chat in your own dedicated room on the web.  If you're brave you can also monitor Twitter for a given keyword or #hashtag for instant feedback and Q&A from your audience. 

To get started, download the SlideSix Presenter and the user guide.  Install the application by launching the file you downloaded (requires the latest version of Adobe AIR to be installed on your computer).  Here's a presentation with some video demos to introduce the app and show you some of the things that you can do:

Where do I get help?

The first place you should check is the onboard help system within the application itself.  In the presentation panel at the top of the application you'll see a 'Help' button that will display the onboard help system.  The help system contains a number of tutorials that cover specific functionality within the app as well as a list of Frequently Asked Questions that should help you figure things out if you get stuck. 

You can also check out the user guide as it will give you a comprehensive overview on all of the features and functionality within the application as well as detailed screenshots that walk you through performing specific tasks.  Finally, if you're really stuck feel free to post a message to the SlideSix Beta Google Group and we will do our best to help you out. 

What if I find a bug?

There are no bugs, my software is perfect.  OK, so that's not quite true.  If you find a bug please post a message to the SlideSix Beta Google Group and our crack staff (me) will do their (my) best to assist you.

Where do I get it?

SlideSix Presenter Download

User Guide

If you follow me on Twitter you probably already know, but I wanted to put the word out that I'm now running ColdFusion 9 Enterprise. From a performance standpoint, the difference on SlideSix is pretty noticeable. I'm also loving how quick the Flex Management Console is now thanks to the complete Flash Remoting overhaul that came with CF9.

Want to know the coolest thing of all about this upgrade? It didn't cost me a dime. That's right, I was lucky enough to get a completely free license to CF9 Enterprise from ColdFusion Product Manager Adam Lehman. Do you have a brilliant idea for a startup that takes advantages of the power of ColdFusion? Pitch your idea to Adrock and you may just get your hands on a free license too!

I can't wait to take advantage of some of the UI enhancments and I know that the PDF upgrades will lead to an immediate improvement in the conversion quality of some presentations. There's also a handful of other ideas I have in mind to play with. More on those later.

As a footnote, I should mention that for the most part the upgrade went fine but there was one minor annoyance. The process to get CF working on IIS7+ is widely documented, but I ran into a different issue. After CF installed I kept getting Handler Mapping errors thrown by IIS. I'm not exactly sure this is the right thing to do, but the fix was to check 'Configure 32 bit webserver' in the web server connector tool. See screenshot:

Update: I ran into this issue because the App Pool was configured to run 32 bit. When upgrading from 32 bit CF to 64 bit make sure to set 'Enable 32 bit applications' to false in the App Pool's advanced settings.

There are a handful of changes that went live last weekend on SlideSix. The changes consisted of several bug fixes, but more importantly some usability enhancements that will hopefully lead to a better user experience. Here's a look at what's new.

Here's a quick puzzler to get your brain working. I just helped out a friend with the following issue but I'm interested in seeing how others go about solving it. I'll borrow Ray's Friday Puzzler rules - don't spend more then 5 minutes on it and the best solution is granted 1,794 bonus points.

Write a UDF that solves the following puzzle: If it is any day or time after noon on Friday (server time) then set 'reportDate' equal to the current date. If it's any day or time before noon on Friday then set 'reportDate' to last Friday. Sounds easy, but it can get a little tricky.

Post your entry in the comments below.

After finishing up a few outstanding fixes and enhancements for SlideSix the other day I decided to give search a bit of love. Well, I didn't quite decide it; it was more of the gentle reminder from Sean Corfield about the existing search not really working all that well that prompted me to action. Regardless, I learned a few things about search that I'm going to share over a few blog posts that will use this alliteration littered title.

I'm doing a little work on cleaning up an application and came acrossed an undesirable circumstance related to the UI. The app contains what appears to be a tab navigator, but rather then the tabbed links revealing hidden form elements in another tab they take the user to a whole new page. The obvious problem with this design is that the user may populate elements in the first 'pseudo-tab' and click on the next tab assuming that they will be able to save the data after populating the other tab. Since I'm not at liberty to make massive changes to the UI I came up with the following solution using jQuery so the user is at least warned when they leave without saving their changes. I think it's a workable solution, and better yet it was terribly easy to do.