DEV Community: Alexandra Grazhevskaja

10 Telegram channels with remote job📢

Alexandra Grazhevskaja — Tue, 03 Dec 2019 14:24:59 +0000

I would like to share my top 10 Telegram channels with remote job, which I do like and find useful.

First two are my favourite ones: only the most interesting jobs, nice interface, no spamm, always up-to-date. They are oriented on IT only, so there is no useless information.

(1). Remotelist (1K+) - jobs from http://remotelist.ru/.

(2). RemoteIT (17K+) - manually sorted out jobs from various websites.

These contain freelance and non-IT jobs as well:

(3). Remote & Freelance (22K+) - jobs from http://digitalbroccoli.com/, a bit spammy, but a lot of different opportunities.

(4). IT Freelance (1K+) - short and concrete job description, but not always up-to-date.

(5). Finder.VC (200K+) - not only IT jobs, but nice interface.

These two are great aggregators for GameDevs or CryptoDevs:

(6). GameDev (6.4K+) - a really nice channel for GameDevs, nice job description, few spamm.

(7). CryptoJobWork (103K+) - channel for crypto jobs, no spamm, but this is a new channel so we need to give them some time.

People, who are interested in remote jobs, may take a look on relocation opportunities as well:

(8). IT Relocation (7.8K+) - nice UI, no spamm and carefully sorted out best relocation options.

(9). JobsAbroad (9K+) - this one has less options, but can be also useful.

And the last one is not about jobs, but about you searching for your dream job. Channel, where you can publish your CV in a nice format:

(10). IT CV (1K+) - I cannot say how much useful it is, but I saw some really interesting CVs there.

Lets expand this listing together! What are your favourite Telegram Job Channels?👇👇👇

Dev.To Time Limit setting

Alexandra Grazhevskaja — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 12:34:35 +0000

Dev.To is becoming so fascinating, that soon we will need Time Limit setting, like Instagram or others have:

Dont you think so?😄

Emoji in presentation?

Alexandra Grazhevskaja — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 08:52:34 +0000

Many people love emoji. Many people on Dev.To love emoji. Emoji start to be a part of everything.

So, I just want to say that Aspose.Slides supports working with emoji in presentations.

And, even if you need to convert your presentation with emoji whether to image, PDF, SWF or other format - Aspose.Slides will render emoji with no problem. You dont need to do anything additional for that, just save presentation in the needed format:

Presentation pres = new Presentation();
pres.save("Emoji.pptx", SaveFormat.Pdf);

Or, you may define emoji substitution rules this way, to be sure how they will substitute each other:

// Define fallback fonts
string[] fontNames = new string[] { "Segoe UI Emoji, Segoe UI Symbol" };

// Create fallback font rule
IFontFallBackRule thirdRule = new FontFallBackRule(0x1F300, 0x1F64F, fontNames);

The API is available for other languages too: Java, C++, Android, etc.

Have you ever used emoji in presentations?
Have you ever created your own emoji?👇👇👇

Create presentation viewer for your Android📱 [use case]

Alexandra Grazhevskaja — Fri, 29 Nov 2019 13:34:01 +0000

I will show how to create your own mobile presentation viewer with Aspose.Slides API for Android.

This is the first article in a series, where I will pass you through some trivial and non-trivial scenarious, like: edit and convert presentation from mobile; upload presentation as a web application or add it to Aspose Cloud Storage; share presentation in various formats; generate unique presenation key; and many others.

Please stay tuned and share which other cases you are interested to see.👇

Presentation viewer for Android:

So, let us start with the first step - basic presentation viewer!👩‍💻

I will pass you through the key points, while you can find the whole project on GitHub.

Open Android Studio.
Install latest Aspose.Slides API for Android.
Define Main Layout with btnOpenPresentation button, or just take it from link.
My lookes simply this way:

Create Main Activity and add this code to onCreate method, which will launch Presentation Activity by btnOpenPresentation click:

public class MainActivity extends AppCompatActivity {

    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
       // ...

       // Start Presentation activity on Open button click
       final Button btnOpenPresentation = findViewById(R.id.btnOpenPresentation);
          btnOpenPresentation.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() {
          @Override
          public void onClick(View view) {
             execPresentationActivity();
       }});
    }

    // Start Presentation activity
    private void execPresentationActivity() {
       Intent openPresentationIntent = new Intent(MainActivity.this, 
       PresentationActivity.class);
       startActivity(openPresentationIntent);
    }
}

Create Presentation Layout with slides’ carousele and a control to show the current slide, or just take it from link.
My looks simply this way, but there is a lot of space to show creativity here👩‍🎨.
Actually, this is a final application we should get:

Create Presentation Activity.
Now, let us stop more detailed.

Define execFilePicker() method and call it from onCreate() in Presentation Activity. This method will open the file system, that we could choose the presentation file this way:

All this is done just in 3 lines:

public class PresentationActivity extends AppCompatActivity {

    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        execFilePicker();
    }

    // Open File system to choose presentation file
    private void execFilePicker() {
        Intent mRequestFileIntent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_GET_CONTENT);
        mRequestFileIntent.setType();
        startActivityForResult(mRequestFileIntent, READ_REQUEST_CODE);
    }
}

Note that we’ve passed READ_REQUEST_CODE to startActivityForResult method. We will use it to check activity result in onActivityResult method and know if we can load the presentation chosen:

public class PresentationActivity extends AppCompatActivity {

    @Override
    public void onActivityResult(int requestCode, int resultCode, Intent resultData) {
        if (requestCode == READ_REQUEST_CODE && resultCode == RESULT_OK && resultData != null) {
            Uri uri = resultData.getData();

            // Load chosen presentation
            execLoadPresentation(uri);
    }}
}

In previous method we’ve called execLoadPresentation method to load chosen presentation.
Then selectSlide method can be called to select the slide of the presentation, which should be shown on Presentation Layout.

public class PresentationActivity extends AppCompatActivity {

  private SlidesApp app;

  // Invoke LoadPresentationTask to load chosen presentation
  private void execLoadPresentation(Uri uri) throws IOException {
      InputStream input = getContentResolver().openInputStream(uri);
      new LoadPresentationTask(this).execute(input);
  }

  // Invoke SelectSlideTask to select a slide to be shown
  private void selectSlide(int pos) {
      new SelectSlideTask(this).execute(pos);
  }
}

Now lets create LoadPresentationTask and SelectSlideTask classes used in two previous methods.

LoadPresentationTask will do the following:

doInBackground - set the presenation, choosed by user, as the current one.

private static class LoadPresentationTask extends AsyncTask<InputStream, Void, Presentation>
{
    // Set chosen presentation as current one
    @Override
    protected Presentation doInBackground(InputStream... inputs) {
        InputStream input = inputs[0];
        Presentation p = input == null ? new Presentation() : new Presentation(input);

        // Call setPresentation by SlidesApp to set chosen presentation as current one
        presentationActivity.app.setPresentation(p, presentationActivity.currSlideViewSize, presentationActivity.slidesListViewSize);
        return p;
    }
}

SelectSlideTask will do the following:

doInBackground - select the slide of presentation to be shown on Presentation Layout.

private static class SelectSlideTask extends AsyncTask<Integer, Void, Bitmap> 
{
    // Select the slide, that should be shown
    @Override
    protected Bitmap doInBackground(Integer... ints) {
        int pos = ints[0];
        return presentationActivity.app.selectSlide(pos);
    }
}

These tasks refer to presentationActivity.app.setPresentation() and presentationActivity.app.selectSlide(), where presentationActivity.app - is the instance of SlidesApp class, which manages all logic about Presentation and Slide objects.

In the end, we came to the main part of the story.👩‍🏫
❗️THE MAGIC STARTS HERE!❗️

SlidesApp class incapsulates all the logic to work with Aspose.Slides API for Android.
This class will allow us to locally save presentation, get all slides, set current slide, convert it into the thumbnail, calculate thumbnail’s size, etc.

Import IPresentation, ISlide, ISlideCollection types:

import com.aspose.slides.IPresentation;
import com.aspose.slides.ISlide;
import com.aspose.slides.ISlideCollection;

Add SlidesApp class with the instances of current presentation and current slide:

public class SlidesApp extends Application {
    private IPresentation presentation;
    private Bitmap currSlide;
    //...
}

Now lets implement selectSlide method, that will call getSlides to retrieve all presentation slides, then get the slide needed by its id. And, get the thumbnail of the slide with getThumbnail method.

public class SlidesApp extends Application {
    public Bitmap selectSlide(int idx) {
        //...
        this.currSlide = this.presentation.getSlides().get_Item(idx).getThumbnail(this.slideThumbnailSize);
        return this.currSlide;
    }
}

The thumbnail is saved into currSlide property and returned back into SelectSlideTask, which will draw it on Presentation Layout:

public class PresentationActivity extends AppCompatActivity {
    private ImageView currSlide;
    //...
}

private static class SelectSlideTask extends AsyncTask<Integer, Void, Bitmap> 
{
    private final PresentationActivity presentationActivity;

    @Override
    protected void onPostExecute(Bitmap result) {
        // Set thumbnail to currSlide image view, that it could be drawn on Presentation Layout
        presentationActivity.currSlide.setImageBitmap(result);
    }
}

I have shown you how to developer a basic presentation viewer, while there are a lot of features you can easily add to this application with Aspose.Slides API for Android to edit, convert or manage presentation or a certain slide. Check it out here.👈

500 followers!😱🤩 About myself

Alexandra Grazhevskaja — Fri, 08 Nov 2019 16:53:07 +0000

Few days ago I celebrated my first 500 followers on Dev.To.🎉
Actually, YOU 👋 are first 500 followers in my life, and I am glad that it happend on Dev.To. It is a friendly and intelligent environment of nice, professional and passionate people!

I skipped to write the introduction post at the very begining, so I would like to do that now.

Who I am?

I am an IT girl.👩‍💻 Yes, so short.💁‍♀️

Actually, I have a mixed education and experience: linguistic, engineering and scientific. But, what have always been a significant part of my life - is languages:

I studied human languages in the lingustic gymnasium. I was even supposed to become a professional linguist.
Then I learned programming languages at IT university and developer’s job. I even worked to create my own programming language while being a postgraduate.
Now, I am learning marketing language.

These three skills help me to be who I am. Programming have taught me to structure information in my mind, lingustics - to structure it on paper and marketing tells how to introduce information after all.👆

Why I am here?

I am here for both fun and job.

I want to enjoy communication with like minded people, learn and share. This is my first blogging experience and I hope to improve myself in that. I had some written experience before: scientific articles, technical articles, esses, etc. But, writting on Dev.To is a new format for me - it requires more collaboration and understanding the audience.

I want to tell you about Aspose products, because they are great.🙌⭐️
I am Developer Evangelist in Aspose - yes, the role, that nobody knows what is it.😁
For me, being Developer Evangelist means - showing you that Aspose products are great, as well as doing everything to make them better for you.
I have already published few posts about Aspose.Slides, and it seems you liked them:

Boost your presentations with GIFs

Alexandra Grazhevskaja ・ Sep 30 '19 ・ 3 min read

#discuss #beginners #api #programming

Automate presentation speaker notes

Alexandra Grazhevskaja ・ Oct 25 '19 ・ 2 min read

#discuss #beginners #api #programming

Fallback font and font substitution for presentations

Alexandra Grazhevskaja ・ Nov 4 '19 ・ 3 min read

#beginners #api #programming #csharp

What do you want to know about Aspose.Slides and presentations?
What do you want to know about me?👇👇👇

Fallback font and font substitution for presentations

Alexandra Grazhevskaja — Mon, 04 Nov 2019 16:56:39 +0000

First, I want to explain you why this topic is important:
Imagine, you have developed an application for automated presentations generation. You used, Aspose.Slides API, for the known reasons, with all it wealth of opportunities. Your application is cool: it uses nice UI templates, AI/ML-based generation from text, finds the right images from internet, showes complicated 3D graphics and statistics data, sends rockets into space...🚀
You run the application and generate hundreds of presentation. But, suddenly you see a small annoying problem with presentations text... - BLACK BOXES instead of characters in text.

"What’s that? Why? Is that aliens trying to talk to me?" - you think.

Fallback font and Font substitution

The answer is: "No. Your computer is just saying he doesnt know the font of your text."
But there are two backup plans: fallback font and font substitution.

Fallback font

When your system meets a Unicode character, it checks if it's in the specified font. In case it’s not - it starts to look through all the fonts to find the suitable one, based on the character glyph. The last font - fallback font - has glyphs for all the characters, and it will be checked if the character needed was not found in all other fonts.
Glyphs - are just visual representations of any Unicode character. They are something more meaningful than a black box for missing characters. Systems that don’t have a fallback font usually display black or white rectangles, question marks, the Unicode Replacement Character (U+FFFD), or nothing at all, in place of unfound characters.

Fonts substitution

Font substitution is the process of using one font instead of another one, when the initial font either can not be found or does not contain glyphs for the required characters. Font is choosen by similarity, based on: font family, system's font configuration, etc.

How can I use fallback fonts and font substitution to save the situation? - you ask.

How to use it

Aspose.Slides API has a FontsManager, which allows to flexibily manage fonts in presentation: set, embed, replace, substitute them. In order to control the fallback font replacement, you may define the rules for that, setting font used with the characters Unicode range:

IFontFallBackRule firstRule = new FontFallBackRule(startUnicodeIndex, endUnicodeIndex, "Vijaya");
IFontFallBackRule secondRule = new FontFallBackRule(0x3040, 0x309F, "MS Mincho, MS Gothic");

Add them to rules collection and set this collection to FontsManager’s:

IFontFallBackRulesCollection rules = new FontFallBackRulesCollection();
rules.Add(firstRule);
rules.Add(secondRule);

presentation.FontsManager.FontFallBackRulesCollection = rules;

Now let’s try to render thumbnail with new rules and save to PNG:

presentation.Slides[0].GetThumbnail(1f, 1f).Save(dataDir + "Slide_0.png", ImageFormat.Png);

Let us see the result achieved. The first one - is the image without using the fallback font, the second - uses it.

Without fallback font:

With fallback font:

Font substitution is the same easy to use, and you can find more here and here.👈

How many of you know which language is on the images? Please, comment.😁👇👇👇

Developers Halloween

Alexandra Grazhevskaja — Thu, 31 Oct 2019 15:13:10 +0000

Halloween is weird.
But, if I would be someone/something on Halloween - I would be YOUR FALLEN DOWN PRODUCTION!!!😝

Whom would you be on Developers Halloween?👇👇👇

What is fallback font?

Alexandra Grazhevskaja — Thu, 31 Oct 2019 12:59:39 +0000

I am exploring what fallback font is, working under an article about Aspose.Slides product. I am curious to know how would someone explain what is fallback font, like I am five!😀🤔

Please, explain me in comments!👇

Have you ever lost all of your data?😰

Alexandra Grazhevskaja — Thu, 31 Oct 2019 12:20:17 +0000

It happened to me in a distant past - my PC was stolen.
And the worst thing - I had all my life data there and had no backup.
All of my data, starting from my cat`s childhood photos and ending important documents, were lost forever.
That was a lesson for all the life - backup your personal data as well!!😅

Tell your story in comments!👇👇👇

Convert anything to anything

Alexandra Grazhevskaja — Thu, 31 Oct 2019 10:02:51 +0000

When someone is asking: "Which tool I can use to convert something to something", there is always someone else answering: "Aspose Aspose Aspose"! 😁👍👏

answer re: Converting Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, and Word to Images in .NET using Aspose

Nov 20 '12

You will need Aspose.Slides, Aspose.Words, Aspose.Cells and Aspose.Pdf or you can use Web Api

Open Full Answer

Really, there are so many possibilities with Aspose products, that soon you will be able to convert anything to anything!

Write in comments ANY file format and I will tell you if Aspose products work with it!👇💪

Get url clicks with Dev.TO API

Alexandra Grazhevskaja — Tue, 29 Oct 2019 13:44:35 +0000

Hi all!
I am exploring Dev.To API, and would like to get the amount of clicks on the url inside my article.
Is there any way to do that?🙄

Automate presentation speaker notes

Alexandra Grazhevskaja — Fri, 25 Oct 2019 20:25:30 +0000

What are speaker notes actually?💁‍♀️
I like the explanations that they are a mind map of the presentation.👆

Speaker notes’ workflow

Usually my workflow to prepare speaker notes is the following:

I prepare a separate document with my speech.
Then I need to sort out the theses from this text as speaker notes.
I prefer to have them printed in case something goes wrong. And, trust me, when you need to present - something goes wrong more often than you expect. Powerpoint starts to buggy, computer breaks up, meteorites fall...😅
Then I need to add speaker notes into each slide.

It takes time...🤦‍♀️

Or I can do vice versa:

Add speaker notes one by one into each slide.
Export speaker notes into a document and print.

I may also need to give speaker notes to team members, who also work under this presentation. Or share speaker notes with the audience.

How do you prepare speaker notes? Please share in comments.👇

Automate speaker notes

Being developers, we like to automate everything. So and I was looking for a way to automatically manage speaker notes.

Aspose.Slides API was a good solution for me, as it also allows many other options as: copy slide notes from another presentations; convert slide notes into HTML in case I want to pubish it on the web; and others.

I will better show you how I add slide notes:

// Create presentation
using(Presentation presentation = new Presentation())
{
    // Create slide notes
    INotesSlide notesSlide = presentation.Slides[0].NotesSlideManager.AddNotesSlide();
    notesSlide.NotesTextFrame.Text = "This is my very helpful slide note!";
    presentation.ViewProperties.NormalViewProperties.HorizontalBarState = SplitterBarStateType.Restored;

    presentation.Save("pres.pptx", SaveFormat.Pptx);
}

Then I may want to access slide notes for extracting them anywhere, or I would convert slide notes into HTML to publish them on web:

    // Access slide notes for extracting
    var slide = presentation.Slides[0];
    NotesSlideEx notes = slide.NotesSlide;

    // Convert into HTML
    HtmlOptions opt = new HtmlOptions();
    INotesCommentsLayoutingOptions options = opt.NotesCommentsLayouting;
    options.NotesPosition = NotesPositions.BottomFull;
    presentation.Save("output.html", SaveFormat.Html, opt);

Easy!👌

It’s also possible to use Aspose.Slides from Java, C++ or other languages.

How do you automate working with speaker notes? What would you like to automate here? Please share in comments.👇