presentation mode ubuntu

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What does xfce4 power-manager do in "presentation mode"?

What exactly does the xfce4-power-manager if I press the button for presentation mode?

Is it called X function? Or what else?

2 Answers 2

It does two things, both intended to keep automatic features from messing up a presentation where you don't touch the machine for a long time (e.g. a teacher showing a video to a class):

• Turns off DPMS (Display Power Management Signaling) so your screen won't blank or sleep
• Prevents screensaver mode from activating

It prevents your system from suspending or hibernating.

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Beyond PowerPoint: 4 Linux Presentation Tools

Go beyond LibreOffice Impress, go beyond PowerPoint! Linux has many options for presentations, and these lesser-known desktop apps are lightweight, powerful, and will certainly surprise you with what they can do.

Presentations are a curious thing.

Many people hate them with the passion of a thousand burning suns. Yet there are many who love experimenting with typography and color in their slides. Regardless of which team you're on, you should know there are other options for presentations on Linux besides LibreOffice Impress. I'm not talking about online tools like Prezi , because this time the spotlight is on lesser-known desktop apps. They are lightweight, powerful, and different than what you're used to.

ffDiaporama

The primary purpose of ffDiaporama is not creating presentations—it's actually a movie creator application. While it's relatively simple compared to other video editing tools for Linux , ffDiaporama supports several effects and filters for images and animations, lets you add music to videos and combine several clips into one movie. The interface might seem daunting at first, but putting together a slideshow is not too hard.

If you try ffDiaporama, you'll realize there is nothing stopping you from creating presentations with it. Instead of importing video, you'll add text as Titles, and thanks to extensions like Texturemate and OpenClipart you can insert different shapes and backgrounds into slides.

ffDiaporama is particularly suitable for screencasts or multimedia-rich presentations, which can be rendered into one of many supported video formats, in Full HD or as a lighter video for smartphones and Web. Speaking of Web, ffDiaporama makes it possible to upload videos to YouTube or Dailymotion. You can install it from packages provided on the official website , or build it from source.

• Can create video presentations and slideshows with background music
• Offers more than a hundred transition effects
• The usage learning curve could be too steep
• Cannot import PowerPoint or Impress files

If you don't want to give up Impress, but still want to try something new, Impressive is a good choice. Simply put, it's a presentation post-processing tool. Create a presentation in whichever application you want, export it to PDF, then use Impressive to display it. This might seem counter-intuitive (or just plain superfluous), but Impressive has a few attractive features to impress you.

First of all, Impressive is super-lightweight and portable. It doesn't require installation and you can take it anywhere on a USB stick. Furthermore, it doesn't have an intrusive or complicated interface; in fact, it just runs from the terminal. Put your presentation in the same directory as Impressive, then type

into the terminal, and start gliding through your presentation with either the keyboard (arrow keys, Space and Backspace) or the mouse wheel.

The main point of Impressive is to keep the audience focused on the important parts of your presentation. You can do this by drawing highlight boxes around parts of text with the mouse, zooming in with the Z key, or pressing Enter to activate the Spotlight which follows the cursor. When you need to jump to a specific slide or want to see all slides at once, access the Overview mode by pressing the Tab key.

Like any other command-line tool, Impressive can run with different options (switches) appended. For example, the

option shows a progress bar for the presentation, while

starts Impressive in windowed instead of full-screen mode. The complete list of options is available in the official documentation . There you will also find information on how to create a custom settings file for each presentation.

• Portable and cross-platform, easy to navigate
• Offers practical, attention-grabbing features
• Runs in the terminal, which might put off beginners
• Any configuration beyond the basics requires studying the manual

Calligra Stage

Of all the tools in this text, Calligra Stage is the one you've most likely heard of, since it's a part of KDE's office suite . Previously called KPresenter, Calligra Stage doesn't have as many features as LibreOffice Impress, but it has a solid basic set of functions. You can use templates or make a presentation from scratch with custom slides, and there are several effects for slide transitions. Stage can work with Microsoft PowerPoint and MagicPoint presentations, but its default file format is ODF (or more precisely, ODP).

Apart from features you'd expect from a presentation tool (like slide navigation and organization), Stage lets you export presentations into fully functional HTML pages, which is great if you want to make a slideshow or design an interactive infographic . Stage makes use of view modes for different purposes, offering Normal View for editing slides, Notes View for adding notes to each slide, and Slide Sorter where you can reorganize, rename, remove or duplicate the slides.

You can also enable a docker (a sidebar within the Stage window) where you can see all slides as thumbnails, in a detailed list or in Minimal View mode. Finally, the Presenter View helps you control the flow of your presentation by displaying slide notes, a timer, and the current position in the presentation.

Stage can be installed as a standalone application, or you can grab the entire office suite from the repositories of most Linux distributions . Good news is that Stage is available for Windows and OS X as well, and even better news is that a special Calligra Gemini version with adaptive interface for tablets is in the works. You might wonder, are there any bad news?

Well, Stage (and the entire Calligra suite) is still in development; in fact, a new version came out a while ago. This means that features are still missing, especially in terms of tweaking Stage itself, as the configuration dialog is quite limited for a KDE application. Like in most other Microsoft Office alternatives, support for proprietary file formats in Calligra Stage remains to be improved.

• Handy view modes for better control over the presentation
• Innovative interface for tablets is in development
• Lacks application preferences and advanced features
• Importing PPT(X) files is not always satisfactory

SlideCrunch

What pdftk is to PDF files, SlideCrunch is to presentations. For users who are not allergic to the command-line, this tool is a great way to manage presentations. It can merge files (PDF or SVG) into a slideshow, separate a presentation into individual slides (images), and even create a slidecast with audio narration. If your presentation has notes, SlideCrunch can arrange them next to the slides to produce a neat handout.

SlideCrunch doesn't require installation, although it does have a list of dependencies . Once those are satisfied, you can run it as any other executable script. However, it won't do much for your presentation if you don't specify the options in a separate text file called slideshow.txt . This file can contain cues for slide duration, notes for each slide, information about the author, and more. SlideCrunch can supplement your current presentation tool, but it can hardly replace a full-fledged application like Impress.

• Provides a quick way to merge or split presentations
• Practical for generating handouts
• Requires the use of terminal and a DIY configuration file
• Documentation is not novice-friendly

While Impress still reigns as the unbeatable alternative to PowerPoint , it might not be long before that changes. After all, new office tools are on the horizon, and small applications like the ones listed here already have their users. As they continue to improve, some of us might even start enjoying presentations.

Have you tried any of these apps or perhaps discovered other presentation tools for Linux? As always, you're welcome to share your experiences and opinions in the comments.

Image Credits: Business vector designed by Freepik , ffDiaporama screenshots page , Calligra Stage screenshots page , Calligra Gemini project , SlideCrunch project page .

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Presentation mode in Xfce Power Manager

Post by H.Remedy » Tue Oct 14, 2014 1:44 am

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• Topics: Active | Unanswered
• »  Desktop
• »  Toggling presentation mode via terminal. (xfce4-power-manager)

#1 2019-01-18 12:35:48

Toggling presentation mode via terminal. (xfce4-power-manager)

Is it possible to toggle the presentation mode via a terminal? I'd like to bind it to a key in openbox.

#2 2019-01-18 14:23:41

Re: Toggling presentation mode via terminal. (xfce4-power-manager)

Hello and welcome.

You can use:

The "-T" will toggle the setting between true and false.

Please remember to mark your thread [SOLVED] to make it easier for others to find --- How To Ask For Help | FAQ | Developer Wiki   |  Community | Contribute ---

#3 2019-01-19 09:09:26

Fantastic! Thank you and thank you for the welcome. Good to be here.

#4 2020-05-01 18:52:22

Is there a command that will return the current state of the toggle?

#5 2020-05-01 20:21:17

If all you want to see is a true or false, this should do it:

#6 2020-05-02 07:50:39

Perfect! Thank you.

#7 2022-01-08 14:00:54

Hello, this is exactly what I was looking for, so thank you. It's great, that this can be turned into a shortcut.

Also, is there a way to have an icon or something, that sits somewhere in the xfce4-panel (taskbar), which shows the current status after the toggle?

#8 2022-01-08 14:42:43

I have never used it but xfce4-genmon-plugin should be able to do it. xfconf allows monitoring a channel, so for example, the following:

will keep watching the xfce4-desktop channel for changes.

#9 2022-01-08 15:28:08

#10 2022-01-08 15:44:22

I apologize, ToZ. That's way too off-topic but your panel icons are lit. What's the theme called?

#11 2022-01-08 15:50:40

From the VM with that screenshot, they are WhiteSur. The elementary-xfce icon set looks similar.

#12 2022-01-13 10:27:56

Also it seems that it doesn't matter if  the laptop is plugged in or not.

#13 2022-01-13 11:56:03

It was added in version 1.7.0. As a workaround, you could use the xfce4-genmon-plugin and a script like this:

...just change the ON_ICON and OFF_ICON variables to suit.

#14 2022-01-13 21:03:41

But can't I just upgrade it? I mean this came with my distribution of xubuntu 18.04 (updated to 20.04), which I initially installed on the previous laptop. I just took the HDD after it died and I am now using it on this one, so I am not sure if this is the initial version of power manager, or it got updated somewhere along the way. I am not on version 1.6.6 for any particular reason.

#15 2022-01-13 21:23:12

Xubuntu 20.04 only packages up to 1.6.6 - you'd need to either upgrade to a newer distro version or enable some test/dev repository.

#16 2022-04-23 15:43:57

Thanks also. xfconf-query --help and the docs unfortunately make us think that the command would be

which doesn't work.

Last edited by kunzlata (2022-04-23 15:44:25)

#17 2022-04-23 16:52:51

You need to be careful to get the correct path to the key. You can get the complete list of of keys with:

...and there you can see:

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Presentations (last edited 2018-05-20 10:51:30 by costales )

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Basic presentations with LaTeX Beamer

Author: Bruce Byfield

Since slide shows are graphical themselves, most people associate them with GUI programs. Yet you can build slide shows just as effectively with some of the simplest and oldest of GNU/Linux tools. A case in point is LaTeX Beamer , which adds extensions to the classic LaTeX typesetting program to produce PDF presentations. Although LaTeX Beamer is capable of considerable complexity, you need to know surprisingly little in order to produce a slide show.

By longstanding tradition, LaTeX is installed by default in major distributions. Beamer is not, although usually it is available as a package. However, until you come to compile your presentation, the documentation for the programs is more important to you than the programs themselves, although you might want to check their availability before you invest your time.

To begin working, create a folder for the presentation and place in it any graphics or other objects that you might want to use in the presentation. Producing the slide show will create a number of files, too, and keeping everything in one folder is the easiest way of keeping track of it all.

Open a text editor and enter the basic markup for a document, or use Kile, the graphical editor for LaTeX, which includes a Beamer document template. The basic structure is:

Even if you are new to LaTeX, this basic structure should be self-explanatory. The first line declares the type of document, just as in an HTML file, and gives the file access to Beamer’s resources. The next three lines give basic information about the presentation, which Beamer can pick up automatically while compiling. Depending on how customized your presentation is, you may be adding more structure in these sections. The actual content of the presentation is entered between the begin and end tags of the document.

However, before you start entering content, you need to add slides. Your first slide is probably a title page, whose structure is:

Next, you may want an outline or table of contents for the entire presentation. Enter:

The section is declared so that you can automatically generate the table of contents. The asterisk indicates that this page should not be included in the table of contents when it is generated. Other pages you want included will have their own sections. In effect, the section’s name serves as the title of the slide.

The rest of the slides in the program have a similar structure. For instance, the third slide might be defined as:

Entering content on slides

As you might expect, you enter content between the begin and end tags for each frame. If you choose, you can simply start typing. However, if you want to follow the slide show tradition of putting points in bullet form, you can use this structure:

tags as necessary.

If you want a graphic in PNG format, then enter:

LaTeX also supports other graphical formats, such as EPS or JPEG. If you place all of the slide show’s graphics in the same folder, as suggested, then the file path needs to include only the file name. You can also change the alignment of the graphic by replacing “center” with “left” or “right” as appropriate.

In addition to text and graphics, you also can include other structural elements in LaTeX, including formulas, numbered lists, tables, hyperlinks, font sizes, and multiple column layouts for individual frames. With LaTeX, you have an entire document layout program available for your presentations. However, defining some of these structures, such as tables, can be challenging no matter what your level of expertise, since you are working non-graphically. Therefore it’s a good idea to constantly convert your presentation to PDF as you work, to see whether you have made any mistakes. More on how to export the presentation in a moment.

Basic customizations

Once you are comfortable with the basics of structuring a slide show and adding slides, you can customize the look and feel of your presentation.

One especially useful customization is to use pause to break up content on a slide, revealing the material below only as you advance. This tool is useful for revealing bullet points one at a time, or for concealing the answer to a question until you are ready to display it.

In addition, Beamer includes optional themes for backgrounds that you can define by adding usetheme{ themename } below the document class declaration at the beginning of the file. You can also define color themes ( usecolortheme{ themename } ), font themes ( usefonttheme{ themename } ), inner themes for everything on a frame or slide ( useinnertheme{ themename } ), and outer themes for slide borders and headers and footers ( useoutertheme{ themename } ). All these themes are stored in a Debian system in subfolders of /usr/share/textmf/tex/latex/Beamer/themes, and in a similar location in other distros.

Not only can these themes be mixed and matched, but they can be individually customized as well. For example, you could set the font for the title of slides to use Times Roman with setBeamerfont{title}{shape=itshape,family=rmfamily} . In short, so long as you have the patience to learn, Beamer lacks little found in a conventional presentation program like OpenOffice.org’s Impress — except, perhaps, convenience.

Compiling and using the presentation

When you are finished designing your slide show and adding its content, save the file with a .tex extension, then run the command pdflatex filename to prepare your show. If you are using Kile, you can perform the same operation by selecting Build -> Compile ->PDFLaTeX. Either way, the pdflatex command produces a log of the operation, which you can use to troubleshoot, as well as the PDF output file, both of which are located in the same directory as your .tex file.

To run the presentation, open the file in the PDF viewer of your choice, with the window maximized and the zoom set as high as possible. An especially good PDF viewer is Evince , which has both a full-screen and a presentation mode. With other PDF viewers, your audience may notice the presence of navigation bars and menus, but otherwise, your Beamer-produced presentation should pass muster as well as any slide show without sound. It might even gain points for the originality of its slide design.

How much you want to learn about Beamer depends on your needs. The program includes a thorough manual that not only steps you through a sample presentation, but also gives concrete advice about workflow when planning and designing a presentation. You can even learn how to add notes and handouts to your presentations from it.

You can think of working with Beamer as a throwback to the earliest days of free operating systems. You might not want to use Beamer all the time, but there’s something satisfying about working in this way — if only the feeling that, by the time you’ve produced your first presentation, you’ve learned more about your operating system.

Even without going deeply into the arcana of LaTeX and the programs related to it, you can still learn enough to produce a respectable slide show — proving yet again, as GNU/Linux often does, that command-line tools can still match the results of desktop tools, if only you can accustom yourself to the change in perspective.

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Impress slides are blank in presentation mode

I use a dual-boot with both windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.04. I created a presentation in LibreOffice Impress (v6.4) in windows, where it worked as expected. In Linux, I opened the same file, but when I entered presentation mode, the slides where blank. I created another presentation, this time in Linux, and the same problem occurred: the screen is blank when I open presentation mode. It works fine in windows. Any advice would be appreciated, although since I can still open the presentations in windows, this isn’t the end of the world.

There might be a problem with initial install in Ubuntu 20.04, but I’m not experienced in this. See this question, Cannot print anything, exporting to PDF produces blank PDF

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Hi @fenderico ,

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Have you run a full system update?:

Hi @wolfman , I have a nvidia geforce 820m with its own proprietary drivers installed, I’m on Ubuntu mate 16.10

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PyCharm 2024.1 Help

Ide viewing modes.

PyCharm lets you switch between several viewing modes for different usage styles and scenarios. For example, when you need to focus on the code or present to an audience.

PyCharm expands the main window to occupy the entire screen. On macOS, all operating system controls are hidden, but you can access the main menu if you hover over the top of the screen.

The editor occupies the entire main window with the source code centered. All other elements of the UI are hidden (tool windows, toolbars, and editor tabs) to help you focus on the source code of the current file. You can still use shortcuts to open tool windows, navigate, and perform other actions.

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By default, the editor text in the Distraction-free and Zen viewing modes is centered vertically and the text column width corresponds to the Hard wrap at option on the Editor | Code Style page of the IDE settings  Ctrl+Alt+S . This means that if your code will be centered when formatted properly , but if there are long unwrapped lines, the text might go beyond the viewport while there is a large margin on the left. In such cases, you may want to decrease the left margin using the Left margin in distraction free mode option on the Advanced Settings page of the IDE settings  Ctrl+Alt+S .

Toggle viewing modes on and off

In the main menu, go to View | Appearance and select Enter <viewing mode> or Exit <viewing mode> .

Use the quick switcher:

In the main menu, go to View | Quick Switch Scheme (or press Ctrl+` ).

In the Switch popup, select View Mode and then select Enter <viewing mode> or Exit <viewing mode> .

Use Find Action : press Ctrl+Shift+A , and start typing the name of the viewing mode. Then select Enter <viewing mode> or Exit <viewing mode> from the list and press Enter .

Map actions that toggle viewing modes on and off to your preferred key combinations .

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Recently, a fresh set of L4T Ubuntu images were released based on the newest Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release. These builds work on all Switch versions, from the OG (exploit-friendly) unit through to newer, patched models (where a modchip is required).

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May 21st, 2024 26 4

At Microsoft Build 2024 , we’re thrilled to unveil a new set of features and tools designed to make .NET development faster and easier.

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Here’s a look at our updates & announcements:

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Here’s how you can use a Smart Component to intelligently paste data from the clipboard directly into a form.

Expanding the .NET AI ecosystem

We have collaborated with numerous partners, at Microsoft and across the industry, to enable developers to tap into the AI ecosystem. One of our most exciting collaborations this year has been with OpenAI. We partnered with them to deliver an official .NET library, which is set to be released later this month. This collaboration and new SDK ensures that .NET developers have a delightful experience and will have parity with other programming language libraries that you may be familiar with. It also provides support for the latest OpenAI features and models, such as GPT4o and Assistants v2, and a unified experience across OpenAI and Azure OpenAI. Please join our OpenAI SDK for .NET Advisors in order to influence the shape of this SDK.

Our partnerships extend beyond this. Last year, we announced official C# clients with Qdrant and Milivus . Our collaborative efforts continue as we work with partners like Weavite to offer developers a variety of .NET vector database options. Finally, we’ve been working with teams at Microsoft including Semantic Kernel, Azure SQL, and Azure AI Search to ensure that our developers can have seamless native experience with their AI capabilities.

Future Investments: Monitoring and Observing your LLM Apps.

Large language model (LLM) applications require reliable, performant, and high-quality outcomes. Developers need to measure and track the results and behaviors of their LLM applications in both development and production environments and identify and resolve any issues.

Our team is working on how developers can use .NET Aspire , Semantic Kernel , and Azure to monitor their AI applications. These features are in preview, and we welcome your feedback. The following images demonstrate how you can use .NET Aspire with minimal code to collect detailed metrics and tracing data from Semantic Kernel, such as the model, token count, prompt, and generated response, following the OpenTelemetry standard convention for LLMs that’s currently being designed.

Developers can view these traces in development with .NET Aspire and in production with various Azure Monitor tools like App Insights. The following is an example of enabling tracing in both .NET Aspire and App Insights.

We have made collecting this telemetry with Semantic Kernel a breeze with just a few lines of code:

We are invested in making .NET a spectacular platform for building and integrating AI into your apps and working seamlessly with libraries in the AI ecosystem and with amazing frameworks including ASP.NET Core and .NET Aspire for building cloud-native apps. Next, let’s go a bit deeper on how we are investing in building cloud-native apps with .NET.

Cloud-native Development with .NET

Using .NET, you can build secure, efficient, resilient, observable, and configurable cloud-native applications. We have been enhancing cloud-native app development with reach release by delivering:

• Chiseled containers: Reducing the size of .NET container images
• NativeAOT & Trimming: Reducing app size while improving app startup time
• New features and libraries for ASP.NET Core to streamline cloud-native scenarios.
• Performance: Squeezing every drop of perf in all frameworks and libraries.

We are continuing our journey to improve the developer’s experience for building these apps with the launch of .NET Aspire and continued investment for cloud-native scenarios with .NET 9. Let’s start with .NET Aspire and how you can leverage it today in your .NET applications.

.NET Aspire: Simplifying cloud-native development

.NET Aspire is a new stack that streamlines development of .NET cloud-native apps and services. We are pleased to announce that .NET Aspire is now generally available .

Get started with .NET Aspire today with the latest version Visual Studio 2022 (17.10) , the .NET CLI , or Visual Studio Code with C# Dev Kit . .NET Aspire brings together tools, templates, and NuGet packages that help you build observable, distributed, production-ready applications in .NET more easily. Whether you’re building a new application, adding cloud-native capabilities to an existing one, or are already deploying .NET apps to production in the cloud today, .NET Aspire can help you get there faster.

.NET Aspire enables building distributed applications, including project orchestration, components to integrate with prominent services and platforms, service discovery, service defaults, and so much more.

A main highlight of .NET Aspire is the dashboard, which provides a consolidated view of your apps resources, complete with logs, distributed traces, and metrics. Whether running during the local developer inner-loop or deployed in the cloud, the dashboard provides a real-time, developer-centric view of what your application is doing right now.

The following image shows a trace from a front-end web app all into multiple dependent backend services, caches, and databases.

Developers need to deploy distributed applications throughout their development process for quick testing and need to be able to easily deploy into production when it is time. .NET Aspire is there to help with powerful features for taking your applications to the cloud, with support for provisioning and connecting to cloud services in Azure and AWS during development and deploying applications to Azure Container Apps using the Azure Developer CLI , or Kubernetes with Aspirate .

.NET is Linux Native

.NET is cross-platform. Our mission is to ensure that .NET runs spectacularly everywhere developers build applications 🚀. We have invested a lot into improving developer and production workflows for apps running on Linux.

We work with Canonical, Red Hat, and other maintainers to ensure that .NET packages are available to install from official feeds and updated for security patches on the same schedule as Microsoft.

For example, .NET 8 is available in Ubuntu 24.04 , installable with the following commands.

Containers are the most popular way to deploy cloud-native apps. The smaller the container, the quicker that new nodes can be provisioned. Smaller images are often more secure, too. Chiseled containers are the solution to this, and they are now generally available for Ubuntu 24.04 for .NET 8 and .NET 9. Highly requested globalization-friendly images are now available that include icu and tzdata libraries.

Let’s look at the impact chiseled images have on an ASP.NET Core web app. The Ubuntu 24.04 chiseled image is around 45% smaller than using regular Ubuntu. The only change was using a different base image.

Now, let’s get into some new .NET 9 features and enhancements that you can try today that are focused on optimizing cloud-native apps.

Reducing Memory Usage

Automatic memory management has always been a key feature of .NET with world class garbage collection that is optimized for multiple scenarios. When it comes to cloud-native app development we are taking things to the next level with .NET 9 by introducing a new server garbage collector (GC) mode . This new mode dramatically reduces memory usage, which can lower costs, and at the same time delivers the same excellent performance that .NET is known for.

What does this mean for cloud-native apps? Imagine you had a Kubernetes cluster with two nodes. This new feature will automatically stay within those two nodes longer by adaptively responding to traffic to the scale of requests.

Let’s look at an example of the new server GC mode in action. The chart below shows the Fortunes TechEmpower benchmark app running 1,000 requests per second (RPS) in a container configured with 4 CPU cores. The existing server GC mode is in blue and the new server GC mode is in black. The new mode is using less than a third of the memory 🤯!

Running this example at 10,000 RPS shows a similar improvement. Our testing has shown that the new server GC mode has very minimal impact on other metrics.

Source: ASP.NET Core Benchmarks (Containers page)

Performance is a consistent focus with every release of .NET and .NET 9 is no different. With every new version, people reach out to us telling us that their app got faster just by upgrading. That is indeed the intent! This time around, we have another set of deep changes that will make your apps run faster and leaner in production.

• Exceptions are now 2-4x faster , adopting a more modern implementation.
• Loops are getting faster with loop hoisting and induction variable widening .
• Dynamic PGO is now more efficient by reducing the cost of type checks .
• RyuJIT can deliver better performance by inlining more generic methods .
• Arm64 code can be written to be much faster using SVE/SVE2 SIMD instructions on Arm64 .

We are excited to have you try out these latest low-level optimizations in the .NET runtime and give us feedback on their impact of your apps. Now, let’s get into some higher-level discussion with what is new and coming soon for C#!

C# 13 focuses on flexibility and performance, making many of your favorite features even better. We’re enhancing params parameters to provide you with more flexibility, taking extensions to the next level with extension types, and are adding several features to enhance performance, some of them you’ll get for free, without having to modify your code. Let’s take a look!

Enhancing C# params

params are no longer restricted to arrays!

When the params keyword appears before a parameter, calls to the method can provide a comma delimited list of zero or more values and those values are placed in a collection of the parameter’s type. Starting in C# 13, the params parameter type can be any of the types used with collection expressions, like List<T> , Span<T> , and IEnumerable<T> . You can even use your own collection types if they follow special rules.

Just specify a different collection type as the parameter type:

It’s really that easy to use the collection type that best fits your needs. Programmers using your method can just pass a comma delimited list of values. They do not need to care about the underlying type.

Making params better with spans

One important aspect of performance is reducing memory use, and System.Span<T> and System.ReadonlySpan<T> are tools in reducing memory allocations. You can learn more in Memory and Span usage guidelines .

If you want to use a span, just use the params parameter type to a span type. Values passed to the params parameter are implicitly converted to that span type. If you have two method signatures that differ only by one being a span and the other being an array and the calling code uses a list of values, the span overload is selected. This means you’re running the fastest code available and makes it easier to add span to your apps.

Many of the methods of the .NET Runtime are being updated to accept params Span<T> , so your applications will run faster, even if you don’t directly use spans. This is part of our ongoing effort to make C# faster and more reliable. It’s also an example of the attention we give to ensuring various C# features work well together. Here is an example from StringBuilder .

params and interfaces

The story gets even better with params support for interfaces. If no concrete type is specified, how does the compiler know what type to use?

Just like collection expressions in C# 12, when you specify an interface as a parameter type, it’s a clear indication that you just want anything that implements that interface. Key interfaces are mapped to implementation, so we can give you the best available type that fulfills the interface. The compiler may use an existing type or create one. You should not have any dependencies on the underlying concrete collection type because we will change it if a better type is available.

The great thing about this design is that you can just use interfaces for your params types. If you pass a value of a type that implements the interface, it will be used. When a list of values or a collection expression are passed, the compiler will give you the best concrete type.

Extension types

Extension types aren’t in the current preview, although you’ll see them demonstrated in Mads Torgersen and Dustin Campbell’s What’s new in C# talk . Here’s a sneak peek into this important part of the C# 13 story.

Since C# 3, extension methods have allowed you to add methods to an underlying type, even if you cannot change its code. LINQ is an example of a set of extension methods on IEnumerable<T> . The LINQ extension methods appear as if they were instance methods on the underlying type.

C# 13 takes the next step with extension types. This is a new kind of type that supplies extension members for an underlying type. They have methods, properties and other members that can be instance or static. Instance extension types cannot hold state. For example, they can’t include fields. They can access state on the underlying type or in another location.

There are two kinds of extension types: implicit and explicit extensions. Implicit extension types apply to all occurrences of the underlying type – in the same way extension methods do today. Explicit extension methods and properties apply only to instances of the underlying type that have been converted to the explicit extension type.

An extension type builds on an underlying type, which are just normal C# types. One of the reasons you might use an extension is that you can’t change the code of the underlying type.

Let’s look at some examples, starting with the underlying types and assuming we don’t have access to change their code:

A bit of LINQ code can return whether a Person is a lead. Since we don’t want to write this piece of code every time it’s needed, we could write an extension method, and if desired control access to it via namespaces. Or, we could use and implicit extension type to organize the extensions for the Person class, and provide IsLead as a property to all Person instances:

This property would be called as:

Explicit extensions let you give extra features to specific instances of a type. For example, it makes sense to retrieve which teams a person leads. An explicit extension can provide the Teams property only to leads:

Both implicit and explicit extension types support static members as well as instance members. One way to use this is to provide defaults specific to your scenario. In this case, we have only one organization, and it’s quite awkward to specify it every time we create a person:

Putting this together:

From a usage perspective, extension types allow you to simplify the code that provides the important work and logic of your application. It does this by organizing extensions and supplying extensions that customize specific instances of the underlying objects. From a technical perspective, extension types are an enhancement to the extension methods you use today. You’ll be able to experiment with them in a future preview of C# 13.

This is just a quick overview of what we are working on, and you’ll see more detailed posts as we complete features. To see all the features we’re working on, check out the Roslyn feature status page . Find out more about all these features in Mads Torgersen and Dustin Campbell’s talk What’s New in C# 13 at Microsoft Build.

Web Development with .NET

.NET includes ASP.NET Core , which has everything you need to build modern web apps, including browser-based web apps or scalable backend services. With .NET there’s no need to stitch together a solution from multiple different frameworks. .NET is built for security and optimized for performance, so that you’re ready to handle any server scenario.

We’re continuing to improve the web development experience with .NET and ASP.NET Core. In .NET 9 we’re focused on addressing quality and fundamentals, including performance, security, and reliability. Existing ASP.NET Core features are also getting important upgrades to address the needs of modern cloud-native apps.

Built-in support for OpenAPI document generation

The OpenAPI specification enables developers to define the shape of APIs in a standardized format that can be plugged into client generators, server generators, testing tools, documentation, and more. ASP.NET Core now provides built-in support for generating OpenAPI documents representing controller-based or minimal APIs.

OpenAPI documents can be generated at build-time or runtime from an addressable endpoint and the generated OpenAPI documents can be customized as needed using document and operation transformers.

Improved distributed caching with HybridCache

ASP.NET Core’s support for distributed caching is getting an upgrade with the new HybridCache API . HybridCache augments the existing IDistributedCache support in ASP.NET Core with new capabilities, including multi-tier storage, with a limited in-process (L1) cache supplemented by a separate (usually larger) out-of-process (L2) cache. This “hybrid” approach to cache storage gives the best of both worlds, where most fetches are served efficiently from L1, but cold-start and less-frequently-accessed data still doesn’t hammer the underlying backend, thanks to L2. HybridCache also includes “stampede” protection (to prevent parallel fetches of the same work) and configurable serialization, while simplifying the API usage for common scenarios.

Here’s an example of HybridCache in action:

HybridCache is designed to be a drop-in replacement for most IDistributedCache scenarios, while providing more features, better usability, and improved performance. In our benchmark tests, HybridCache is almost 1000x faster than using IDistributedCache in high cache hit rate scenarios thanks to its multi-tiered cache storage. Caching performance is improved further when using immutable types.

Full Stack Web UI with Blazor

Blazor makes building web UI for your ASP.NET Core apps simple and productive. Blazor developers who have upgraded to .NET 8 have been taking advantage of new features including static server rendering, streaming rendering, enhanced navigation & form handling, and much more.

The feedback from developers has been fantastic, and we have been continuing to improve Blazor with new features that you can try out today in the latest .NET 9 previews including:

• Component constructor injection : Blazor now supports constructor injection for components in addition to the existing support for property injection with @inject . Constructor injection supports optional services and works great with null state checking.
• WebSocket compression : The WebSocket traffic for interactive server rendering is now compressed by default, significantly reducing the message payload size.
• Render pages statically from globally interactive apps : You can now exclude pages from interactive routing in Blazor Web Apps set up for global interactivity and force them to render statically from the server. This is useful when most of your app is interactive, but you have certain pages that must render in the context of a request.

Be sure to check out the release notes for additional details on what’s new in ASP.NET Core in .NET 9 and the ASP.NET Core roadmap for what’s still to come.

Multi-platform Development with .NET

.NET MAUI is .NET’s multi-platform app UI for building beautiful apps across iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows.

Since its launch we have seen explosive growth and adoption from new users and existing Xamarin developers migrating to take advantage of new features and performance. Apps that you use every day are built with .NET MAUI including NBC Sports, Hawaiian Airlines, UPS, Microsoft Azure, DigiD, Seeing AI, E-ZPass Pennsylvania, and so many more. We have loved seeing the continued support from the .NET community building beautiful .NET MAUI libraries & controls, such as the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit , and from control vendors including Telerik , Syncfusion , Grial , DevExpress , and so many more. We are humbled to have your support ensuring .NET MAUI is a world class experience for building multi-platform apps.

In .NET 8, we focused on enhancing performance & quality, supporting our ecosystem, improving the developer experience, and ensuring building Hybrid apps with .NET MAUI and Blazor were top notch. A major focus was shifting our development process to being NuGet package first. This means we can rapidly deploy new service releases and you can easily upgrade in seconds. Today, we are releasing our fourth service release for .NET 8 providing hundreds more improvements that you can leverage today.

Last year we introduced initial support for building .NET MAUI apps in Visual Studio Code across Windows, Mac, and Linux with the C# Dev Kit. This week we have launched a new version of the .NET MAUI extension for VS Code that adds support for XAML IntelliSense and major improvements that you have been requesting. It has been great to see developers leverage VS Code on new platforms for building apps with .NET MAUI, and we have a lot more on the way.

Moving forward we will continue to enhance our migration story for Xamarin developers moving to .NET MAUI and .NET MAUI developers upgrading to newer versions of .NET with the Upgrade Assistant. We will also continue to have consistent and reliable service releases for .NET 8 as we push forward on adding new features for multi-platform developers in .NET 9. You can start to try out some of our newest features such as iOS library multi-targeting , Android Asset Packs to shrink your app size when dealing with large assets such as videos, and Native AOT experimental support for iOS and Mac Catalyst apps which can trim your app size up to 62% while making your startup times nearly 50% faster! In subsequent previews you’ll see features to make building .NET MAUI hybrid apps easier like a new Solution Template for setting up Blazor Hybrid and web apps that share UI , as well as a new HybridWebView control to enable JavaScript frameworks.

We will continue to prioritize your top feedback and encourage you to be active on our GitHub repo, follow along with our release announcements, and give the latest previews and VS Code integration a spin.

We are excited for you to try all of these new features in .NET.

• Download .NET 9 Preview 4 today
• Read the latest .NET 9 release notes for more insights into these features and more.
• Check out the latest features in Visual Studio 2022 (17.10 out today) and the C# Dev Kit for VS Code
• Start building cloud-native apps with .NET Aspire
• Watch our “What is .NET Aspire?” video series to jump start your cloud-native journey.
• Try out our .NET AI samples and learn more on our documentation.
• Save the date for .NET Conf 2024 this November

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Copilot, can you summarize this article? Sure, here it is: Nothing new, special o exiting about .NET MAUI!

Making a cross platform Silverlight like approach was always the correct approach for C#. AvaloniaUI is the only UI that makes sense in C# world anymore.

MAUI SDK stuff is synced up to .NET releases in the Fall, but “copilot” missed that we shipped XAML IntelliSense for VS Code this week 😄

And also… iOS library multi-targeting, Android Asset Packs to shrink your app size when dealing with large assets such as videos, and Native AOT experimental support for iOS and Mac Catalyst apps which can trim your app size up to 62% while making your startup times nearly 50% faster!

Good news, thank you for the summary. I am especially waiting for explicit extension, this will be awesome to add it to current code. Params look great as well.

I can’t wait to write more about C# 13 as more of the features become available. This is going to be a great release!

I don’t see anything that helps to demonstrate that Microsoft is “prioritizing security above all else”, is there another announcement that is focused on security related improvements?

The team has been doing a lot of security work. It didn’t occur to us to include that in the blog post. Most of the work is to our infra, which we rarely talk about (due to level of interest).

Here’s a post from a few years ago about our infra: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/the-evolving-infrastructure-of-net-core/ . It has changed since then and is undergoing significant change now. For example, we’ve had 5+ people working on enabling dotnet/dotnet to be the source of our official builds: https://github.com/dotnet/dotnet . We haven’t talked about that at all yet, beyond GitHub issues. We’ll likely post about this after it is real, with .NET 10.

A concrete example is that we’ve updated our build to use Azure Linux 3.0: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/91826 . We use a modern OS and toolset, while surgically targeting header files from an old OS for broad compatibility, as a general approach. It is challenging to build code that works on a broad set of commonly used OSes (some of which may be in extended support or EOL) while maintaining good security practices. We believe that we’ve developed the best pattern for that. However, the pattern has proven to be somewhat expensive to maintain. I plan to post on this pattern at a later date (after Azure Linux 3.0 is GA).

Additionally, please tak a look at our Secure Future Initiative: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2024/05/03/security-above-all-else-expanding-microsofts-secure-future-initiative/

I should also add that we delivered significant security value with .NET 8 around containers: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/secure-your-container-build-and-publish-with-dotnet-8/ .

In particular, we partnered with Canonical, in two key ways. We delivered chiseled containers, which are oriented equally on security as performance. We also established a secure supply chain between the two companies with no break in custody of assets. This includes the source we offer them and the container images they give us. IMO, this is a big deal. The video on the Canonical partner page speaks to both of these: https://build.microsoft.com/en-US/partners/b1390f64-c2d1-479b-8955-12d95c8fbabe?source=partners .

I should also add that we delivered significant security value with .NET 8 around containers

And yet neither Windows nor 365 rely on .NET 8. They’re stuck with .NET Framework 4.7. So, who cares?

In particular, we partnered with Canonical, in two key ways.

Yeah. Instead of partnering with the Windows and 365 teams, you partnered with the competition. That’s something I won’t soon forget.

Conclusion: Microsoft is not prioritizing security in any meaningful way.

The fact that Windows don’t need to rely on (/integrate) Dotnet Core to use it is a security gain by itself comparing to Dotnet Framework. I think you have misunderstood a lot of things on OS, Frameworks and Security.

Why is the WinUI app development workload for .NET such a large install … 10GB ?

Does anyone actually even use WinUI outside MS anymore? To this day I can’t find a use for them. WPF is just better for most Windows only things (particularly tools apps). For me, MS really killed any desire to use their UI for apps by trying to base it on WinRT ABI frameworks making it pretty much useless IMO. This is not the sandbox approach anyone was looking to dev for (been true since Win8). Silverlight in WP7 was better tbh. I’ve mostly just stopped following anything about it for the most part.

Does .NET 3,6,8 even run in a UWP app? I don’t think so. So the Win10/11 stores just updated to run Win32/Win64 apps instead & a bunch of odd workarounds to get WinUI frameworks to link in those desktop apps needed. Is that about right or am I missing something?

The Extension Types in C# 13 looks interesting.

It would be nice if explicit extension types can be used with pattern matching. For example, in the example mentioned in this article, it would be cleaner if we can write

With some syntax that allows the IsLead property to be used as a test. The user-defined type guards feature of TypeScript comes to mind. So the IsLead property can be written to return a something similar to TypeScript’s type predicate instead of bool.

That is definitely on our mind. Once we all have it in hand, I expect we will find some great next steps and that extension types will evolve over the next couple of releases!

Will there be a way to combine multiple explicit extensions on the same instance? Like e.g.

I’m not sure what you are looking for here, and would love to hear how you would use code like this.

C# will remain a strongly typed language. While a particular instance can have different personalities – via base classes, interfaces, and now explicit extension types – a particular variable will be of a specific type (that can be converted to other types, sometimes automatically).

“Extension types” looks interesting. Is the intention to make them function like traits further down the road? Seeing the popularity of Rust and all. E.g. would you be able to specify Lead as a parameter-type, public Task BotherTeamLead(Lead lead);, and then make multiple unrelated types all have the same extensions for Lead (Lead could be an interface). Because if you squint a bit, the syntax for extension types introduced here looks a lot like trait implementations.

One of the challenging (and sometimes quite fun) aspects of designing C# is that we draw ideas from other languages, but find what we think is the best C# way to do them. Traits was certainly one of the inspirations.

Extensions are not interfaces. They are associated with a specific underlying type. I think we will get closer to traits if we combine them with interfaces – allowing extensions to implement interfaces for the underlying type. That will not be in C# 13 but we are looking forward to feedback on doing that in the future.

allowing extensions to implement interfaces for the underlying type

I think that’d be an elegant solution, nice job! Looking forwards to it maybe-happening sometimes in the future (:

looking for more sources regarding c# “Extension types” is a good example, how different bing.com & google.com are working. That’s not gloating, I prefer the Edge browser with Bing.

bing.com: results on 1st pages mainly about ‘Extension Method’

google.com: results on 1st page are all correct and fit the topic

You won’t find much on extension types yet because we are still building it. We got the first (partially) working bits last week. We’ll preview extension types in upcoming Visual Studio and .NET 9 previews. Look for an in-depth blog post and Microsoft Learn documentation when you can experiment with this brand new feature.

Looks promising,… any news about the AOT? thanks

The output of PrintList method ( params sample) would be without surrounding quotes.

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Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile S.A. (NYSE:SQM) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile S.A. (NYSE: SQM ) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 23, 2024

Operator: Good day, and welcome to the SQM First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] Please also note today's event is being recorded. I'd now like to turn the conference over to Irina Axenova, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Irina Axenova: Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining SQM's earnings conference call for the first quarter of 2024. This conference call will be recorded and is being webcast live. Our earnings press release and the presentation with a summary of the results have been uploaded to our website where you can also find a link to the webcast. Ricardo Ramos, our Chief Executive Officer will be speaking on the call today. Carlos Diaz, Executive Vice President of Lithium; Mark Fones, Vice President of Lithium Development and M&A; [Max Vial] Lithium Market Intelligence Director; Pablo Altimiras, Executive Vice President of Nitrates & Iodine; and Juan Pablo Bellolio, Commercial Vice President of Iodine & Industrial Chemicals are also available to answer any questions.

Our Chief Executive Officer, Ricardo Ramos, unfortunately couldn't join the call today. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that some statements made during this conference call regarding our business outlook, future economic performance, anticipated profitability, revenue, expenses and other financial items are considered forward-looking statements. Please note that the same cautionary language used in our press release and presentation also applies to this call. And now I will leave you with our Chief Financial Officer, Gerardo Illanes.

Gerardo Illanes : Thank you, Irina. Good afternoon, everyone and thank you for joining us today. As you may know, we reported our first quarter 2024 earnings result yesterday. On this call, we will be discussing the key drivers behind these results and sharing our outlook for the year. Our total revenues for the first three months of the year reached almost $1.1 billion with an adjusted EBITDA of over $400 million. Our net profit was impacted by a one-time to adjustment related to the accounting treatment of the lithium mining tax in Chile from previous years, adding up to almost $1.1 billion as of March 31, 2024. This is not having a significant cash impact since the majority of this amount close to $930 million was paid in prior years.

During the first quarter of this year, we delivered strong growth in our sales volume across all of our major business lines, reporting record high quarterly sales volumes in the iodine business, positive sales volume recovery in the fertilizer business and almost 30% higher lithium sales volumes compared to the same period last year. This growth helped partially offset the impact of lower average prices realized for the first quarter 2024. In our nitrates and iodine business unit, we are proud of the results of the ramp up of Pampa Blanca project, which is expected to reach approximately 1,300 metric tons of new iodine capacity this year. Also a few months ago, we began the construction of a seawater pipeline, which is expected to be completed in 2026.

It is an exciting development, but it's also a challenging project, almost 38 kilometers long with a total elevation of over 1,000 meters running from the Pacific coast near the City of Iquique to our Nueva Victoria operations. Once completed, the pipeline will have a capacity of 900 liters per second and will allow us to expand our production capacity even further while delivering fresh water to some neighboring communities. We have seen positive demand trends in the iodine and potassium nitrate market since the beginning of the year. Our outlook is that the iodine market demand could grow by approximately 4% this year, approaching 2022 levels. Our iodine sales volumes are projected to increase in 2024 compared to last year, with an expected stable average sales price with a possibility of a slight upside.

We are similarly optimistic about the potassium nitrate market outlook with expectations of up 15% growth in the demand this year. Our sales volumes are also anticipated to follow a similar pattern. Potassium nitrate prices have been relatively stable over several quarters and we believe this trend could continue for the remainder of the year. In the lithium business unit, having completed expansion of our lithium carbonate capacity in Chile to 210,000 metric tons, we're now focusing on a series of initiatives that should allow us to increase this capacity to 240,000 metric tons by the end of the year, mainly through process improvements, increased quality and efficiency of the existing production facilities. Our lithium hydroxide capacity in Chile has reached 40,000 metric tons per year and we expect to complete this expansion to reach 100,000 metric tons per year during 2025.

In China, we completed the modification of the Dixin lithium hydroxide conversion facility with a total capacity of 20,000 metric tons per year. This project represents years of innovation and development of a chemical facility to refine lithium sulfate produced in the Salar de Atacama to battery grade lithium hydroxide. At the same time, we have reached agreements to toll approximately 20,000 metric tons of lithium sulfate coming from the Salar de Atacama into lithium hydroxide in China. All of this together with the initiatives we're working on in Australia should let us reach a total production capacity of more than 300,000 metric tons of lithium products by the end of 2025. Turning to broader lithium market. We have observed some encouraging trends during the first month of this year.

Strong demand growth have been driven by electric demand market, mainly in China, which accounts for almost 75% of global lithium demand. We anticipate that the total EV sales could reach 17 million units by 2024, representing a 22% increase from 2023. And total lithium demand could exceed 1.1 million tons in 2024, representing a 20% increase compared to the previous year. Given this demand growth, we have anticipated our sales volumes outlook for this year, expecting to sell close to 200,000 metric tons. The expected growth in global lithium supply this year could be up to 30% compared to 2023. However, given current lithium prices, the expected supply from high cost producers could be affected, providing some price stability as has been seen since February this year.

Before concluding and opening the line for questions, I would like to ask Mark to share with us some of the recent developments in our lithium initiatives abroad.

Mark Fones : Thank you, Ricardo. Good afternoon, everyone. From an Australian and internationalism perspective, for SQM it has been a very eventful and exciting start to 2024, with spodumene concentrate production commencing at the world class Mount Holland lithium project jointly owned with our partner Wesfarmers and the completion of the Azure Minerals acquisition with Hancock prospect. We are very fortunate to now have access to two globally significant, which we are progressing with two equally significant Australian partners, Wesfarmers and Hancock Prospect. Moving first to Mount Holland, last year we commenced production at the newly constructed mine and concentrated facilities, exporting our first shipment of spotty main concentrate this month to be tolled in China.

During this calendar year, we expect to produce a total of between 120,000 and 150,000 metric tons of spotty main concentrate, that's SQM's share and to total close to 5,000 metric tons of lithium hydroxide. However, given the timing of tolling and quality certification requirements, we do not anticipate seeing these volumes on the market until the end of the year. In the meantime, work continues on the Kwinana Refinery with construction of our 50,000 tons per year facility at about a 75% to 80% complete and expected to be in production by mid next year, following commission later this year. We will keep progressing with studies and environmental approvals for the Mount Holland mine and concentrator expansion, which would effectively see Mount Holland doubling its polymeric concentrate production facility after FID is taken.

Moving now to the recent acquisition of Azure, which owns 60% of the Andover lithium project in Western Australia also concluded this month. Together with Hancock prospecting, we acquired all the outstanding of Azure Minerals Limited and jointly become owners of 60% of the Andover Lithium project. This significant investment by SQM further highlights our belief in Western Australia as one of the world's prominent hard rock lithium mining jurisdictions. We're extremely happy with this acquisition and with our new partner, Hanko, who will provide excellent project development and mining expertise in Australia to complement SQM’s market leading lithium knowledge. We believe our business model of partnering with great local companies to discover and develop Tier 1 lithium assets, places SQM in a prominent position in the global hard rock lithium market.

In 2024, we will continue to work -- the good work that Azure has done and towards the resource estimate for Andover project as well as providing additional capabilities, continue with studies and regulatory approvals activities, as well as product definition and project development. While work still needs to be done to finalize this resource estimate, we are certainly looking at a deposit of global significance. Outside of these two major projects, as you may have seen in our public announcements, we continue to work on monitor and invest in various early stage exploration projects in Australia with the aim to finding new high grade lithium prospects with the potential for scale. Irina Axenova Thank you, Mark. Operator, we will now open the lines to questions.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Today's first question comes from Ben Isaacson with Scotiabank.

To continue reading the Q&A session, please click here .

AI + Machine Learning , Announcements , Azure AI Content Safety , Azure AI Studio , Azure OpenAI Service , Partners

Introducing GPT-4o: OpenAI’s new flagship multimodal model now in preview on Azure

By Eric Boyd Corporate Vice President, Azure AI Platform, Microsoft

Posted on May 13, 2024 2 min read

• Tag: Copilot
• Tag: Generative AI

Microsoft is thrilled to announce the launch of GPT-4o, OpenAI’s new flagship model on Azure AI. This groundbreaking multimodal model integrates text, vision, and audio capabilities, setting a new standard for generative and conversational AI experiences. GPT-4o is available now in Azure OpenAI Service, to try in preview , with support for text and image.

Azure OpenAI Service

A step forward in generative AI for Azure OpenAI Service

GPT-4o offers a shift in how AI models interact with multimodal inputs. By seamlessly combining text, images, and audio, GPT-4o provides a richer, more engaging user experience.

Launch highlights: Immediate access and what you can expect

Azure OpenAI Service customers can explore GPT-4o’s extensive capabilities through a preview playground in Azure OpenAI Studio starting today in two regions in the US. This initial release focuses on text and vision inputs to provide a glimpse into the model’s potential, paving the way for further capabilities like audio and video.

Efficiency and cost-effectiveness

GPT-4o is engineered for speed and efficiency. Its advanced ability to handle complex queries with minimal resources can translate into cost savings and performance.

Potential use cases to explore with GPT-4o

The introduction of GPT-4o opens numerous possibilities for businesses in various sectors: 

• Enhanced customer service : By integrating diverse data inputs, GPT-4o enables more dynamic and comprehensive customer support interactions.
• Advanced analytics : Leverage GPT-4o’s capability to process and analyze different types of data to enhance decision-making and uncover deeper insights.
• Content innovation : Use GPT-4o’s generative capabilities to create engaging and diverse content formats, catering to a broad range of consumer preferences.

Exciting future developments: GPT-4o at Microsoft Build 2024 

We are eager to share more about GPT-4o and other Azure AI updates at Microsoft Build 2024 , to help developers further unlock the power of generative AI.

Get started with Azure OpenAI Service

Begin your journey with GPT-4o and Azure OpenAI Service by taking the following steps:

• Try out GPT-4o in Azure OpenAI Service Chat Playground (in preview).
• If you are not a current Azure OpenAI Service customer, apply for access by completing this form .
• Learn more about  Azure OpenAI Service  and the  latest enhancements.  
• Understand responsible AI tooling available in Azure with Azure AI Content Safety .
• Review the OpenAI blog on GPT-4o.

Let us know what you think of Azure and what you would like to see in the future.

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Set so that LibreOffice Impress will go straight into show slide mode

When I start my libre office presentation, I would like it to go automatically into slide show mode. How can I do so?

[With Microsoft Office you can do this by renaming a presentation to .pps (from .ppt) or .ppsx (from .pptx)]

• libreoffice

• 1 As far as I know, Impress does not support that feature. You can only save a presentation as a .odp(presentation) and .otp(template). You can try to visit this site and this site for a possible workaround. –  Peachy Aug 19, 2012 at 3:42
• Impress does have the option to "Save As" PowerPoint (autoplay) PPS. You can select from the "All Formats" drop-down selection when saving the file –  stephenmyall Aug 23, 2012 at 20:57

2 Answers 2

You can also do this using terminal

Open terminal Ctrl + Alt + T and run following command

I wanted to run a presentation looping on a notice board but for some odd reasons, pps files were inserting a pause of 10 seconds between last and first slides even if I set the relevant option to 0 sec, whereas odp was working fine.

I don't know about LibreOffice, but I know its 'brother' OpenOffice. In Open Office Impress, if you right-click the file name, you will see the option 'Show'. Selecting that will open the presentation directly in show mode.

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