5. Incorporating Briefing Tools
We are exploring the use of the basic Visage tools to provide a simple briefing or "slide show" application which is completely integrated with the rest of the environment. As analyses are performed, text and graphics can be captured and saved in special frames called 'slides.' A slide is simply a frame with special scripts designed to make it easy to "paste up" other frames and elements for visual presentations. A user simply "drags and drops" the desired frames onto a slide frame, where they are scaled appropriately. Text annotation can be added to the slide using Visage text elements. Slides created in this way can be accumulated in a "slide sorter" frame, which has special scripts making it easy to sequence a presentation by simple drag operations (similar to popular commercial presentation packages, like PowerPoint). In the color plate, an outliner, map, and chart have been dropped in a slide, which has been augmented with text and dropped into the slide sorter (the latter illustrated in Figure 5).
Figure 5: Slide sorter frame
The slider sorter has controls for initiating the sequential display of each slide at full-screen size. Thus, the briefing function has been seamlessly integrated with those of data exploration and analysis. Note that elements on the slide do not lose their separate identity--they are still fully-functional interface objects that can be dragged among displays, used for painting, dynamic query, drill-down and roll-up operations right in the briefing.
The ability to perform these information analysis operations during a presentation raises some interesting opportunities and challenges. First, it provides the ability to answer questions by modifying the graphic. By copying slides in the briefing, it is possible to both preserve the original presentation as well as keep a record of changes created in response to questions. Another challenge which we have not addressed is the dynamic modification of briefing slides to reflect changes in the underlying database. This problem has been addressed partially by current approaches to application embedding and linking. We are currently implementing constraint mechanisms whereby changes can either be propagated or blocked from affecting briefing slides.