Jul 10
22

KPresenter ideas

18 Comments

Day by day KPresenter becomes more and more an end-user presentation application.
However, to be a real end-user application, KPresenter needs some new options and some new cool stuff. That’s why, I think it’s a good idea to ask for KDE community to know the essential need for them.
So if you think KPresenter needs something, please send a comment :) .

There is already a brief idea list from zagge, morice-net, me and some discussion with KDE community members during Akademy.

Presentation tools :

  • Blur effect on highlight mode (presentation tools) and add anti-alisasing (in order to have a smoothy circle)
  • When an animation tool like highlight or black screen was selected play animation like fade effect
  • New tool to navigate easely between slide (For example if presenter view mode is disabled)
  • Allow user to navigate with keyboard when a presentation tool is activated
  • Allow user to resize light (highlight tool)

Page effect :

  • Allow user to set a default page effect for the slideshow (for a 30 slides presentation it’s not very fun to apply 30 times the same effect)
  • Review page effect framework to allow new 3D effect like cube effect.
  • Do all the presentation with an openGl context

UI :

  • Allow user to switch view mode more easely

View :

  • Add outline mode view (morice-net works on this)
  • Add slide sorter view (morice-net works on this)

TextShape

  • Resize text automatically when it goes over the shape

Templates:

Other :

  • Review export pdf, it’s not very beautiful to have white strip. Use the slide size

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Posted in KDE KOffice by ben2367 18 Comments

18 Responses to "KPresenter ideas"

  • Troels Kofoed Jacobsen says:
    22 July 2010 at 14 h 38 min

    It would be awesome to be able to control KPresenter from my Android phone. Even better if such an app included previews for current and next slides as well as notes.

    First an interface allowing this interfacing should be made available from KPresenter (maybe via the d-bus interface) then the app can be written.

  • ben2367 says:
    22 July 2010 at 14 h 48 min

    @Troels Kofoed Jacobsen
    Currently some people work on dbus interfaces on KPresenter to allow KPresenter control from n900. But for the moment no works on android. Actually there is no kde libs / koffice libs build for android, so I think it’s not a priority. But that’s a good idea

  • Wolfgang says:
    22 July 2010 at 15 h 04 min

    I have never used KPresenter, normally I stick to latex/beamer. For me a must have would be to be able to use latex code. E.g. one could write up formulas in a text field which then would be rendered using Latex and then added to the slide as an image. Hopefully there is a better way for embedding Latex into a presenter tool. This is just my first idea.

    I am looking forward to use KPresenter. (Latex is not designed for presentations…)

  • Troels Kofoed Jacobsen says:
    22 July 2010 at 15 h 10 min

    Actually no libs would be needed on android, just an interface to dbus and a custom interface emitting dbus calls to KPresenter via wireless…

  • Robert Forsyth says:
    22 July 2010 at 15 h 16 min

    Please note, I’ve NOT thought long or hard about this.

    The templates and usable artwork, sounds, etc. would seem to be very important – I would think a large, usable and organized library would make or break a product. Also, the presentation tool is part of the office suite, those templates could be themes or brands throughout KOffice, as the tools are shared.

    There are perhaps three levels of view that roughly map on to zooming in and out:
    full screen presentation – follow links, draw on and highlight areas of the slide;
    (zoom out to) edit slide – tools to quickly enter text and manipulate the template;
    (zoom out to) slide sorter – shows many slides, allows you to sort and select for the coming presentation.

  • Robert Forsyth says:
    22 July 2010 at 15 h 28 min

    @Wolfgang, the way I understand it, is KOffice documents contain objects called shapes, but instead of shapes being only rectangles like every other office suite, they can be any shape. So your Latex would be converted to a shape and added to any KOffice document.

    I think the reason for the different documents and applications is, you choose “the best tool for the job”, I supposed like you get or once got regional specialisations (watchmaking in Switzerland). All the tools should be available to all the applications.

    Ideally, you could re-purpose a report as a slide presentation and so on.

  • Wolfgang says:
    22 July 2010 at 15 h 31 min

    @Robert Forsyth, hmm sounds interesting. So the integration part seems to be solved. I will have a look this evening when I have access to my linux box.

  • armijn says:
    22 July 2010 at 15 h 42 min

    There are two things I would love: one is a preview mode which is only available on my screen, so I can see the next slide and already prepare a bit for that. OpenOffice.org has this and it is a feature that has made my presentations go a lot smoother.

    Another would be to be able to write a presentation to a video file, with audio, so you can easily do some sort of “screencast”, without having to use tools like qt-recordmydesktop.

  • ben2367 says:
    22 July 2010 at 16 h 08 min

    @armijn with presenter view mode I think you can have a mode like your preview mode. To enable it, SlideShow > Configure Presenter View

  • Emmanuel Lepage Vallee says:
    22 July 2010 at 17 h 52 min

    KPresenter:
    I would add:
    -KeyJNote like “tab” feature to enable an Expose mode
    -KeyJNote like highlight rectangle and mouse circle
    -More fluent animations, the current one are choppy
    -Path and fade in/out animation (often used in corporate presentation)
    -OpenGL rendering for the presentation
    -”Path” mode like in Other presentation tool to have different slideshow in one file sharing some slides (useful for courses when you have many variants (101,201,301…) and share most the the material, but simply add more slides)

    KOffice:
    -Better support for tables

  • TheBlackCat says:
    22 July 2010 at 18 h 28 min

    Some suggestions (forgive me if this are implemented in trunk):

    UI:
    Document Pane:
    - Drag-and-drop in the Document pane. You should not have to move stuff using buttons.

    - Better use of space, currently the everything is very small and there is a lot of empty space in all of the views.

    - I think just using a widget based on the one used in Dolphin for files would be better, it is prettier, allows for drag-and-drop, makes better use of space, and so on.

    - Similar to KDE file browsers, on drag-and-drop of the slide on the space between to slides it should pop up a menu with “move here”, “copy here”, and “link here”. If you drop it on an existing slide, it should pop up with a menu “move before this slide”, “move after this slide”, copy before, copy after, link before, link after, “copy slide template”, and “copy slide transition”. You should be able to drag a slide onto the slide layouts and slide templates pane which should pup up just one option in both cases, to make a layout from the current slide or make a template from the current slide, respectively.

    - openoffice has been doing some good work with integrating the controls in their equivalent of the document pane directly into the individual page thumbnails (see their renaissance project). I think Gwenview’s Browse mode is a good model of how this could be implemented in a KDE sort of way. When you mouse over files there, a bunch of icons appear that allow for various actions (including selecting files, which I think would be very useful and which I don’t think openoffice has). The buttons should include (in order of importance) a button to select the page (like Dolphin or Gwenview’s + button), a button to start the slideshow at the current page, a button to hide/show the slide in the current slideshow, a button to select the animation (it should show an icon for the current animation if there is one so you can tell at a glance), and probably a button that pops up a menu with a few other options (delete slide, copy slide, paste after current slide, paste before current slide, show slide template)

    -”Page #” takes up a lot of space when the name is not editable. So either being able to edit the page name, or just having the number off to one side, I think would be better.

    Slide Layouts pane (and templates pane and slide masters pane if you make it):
    -It need some controls like the document pane for adding, removing, and modifying layouts/templates. This would probably be similar to the documents pane, and should have the same views available.

    -It should support buttons on the icons also, at least for selecting items, for viewing the template/layout full-screen for editing, and for duplicating them.

    -You should be able to drag-and-drop a template/layout on a page in the documents view, which would popup the option to apply that template/layout to the page. Similarly, you should be able to drag and drop a template/layout between two pages, which would popup the option to make a new page with that template/layout (or perhaps in this case just making it would be fine.

    General:
    -I would change the “normal” vs. “notes” view to a “show notes” check box.
    -Custom slide show editor should support drag and drop. Once again, it should probably
    -There should be a templates pane like the layouts pane
    -You should be able to configure the layout of the presenter view using a drag-and-drop interface, with the ability to add and remove elements. Plasma might be able to help with this.
    -The slide sorter should be similar to my description of the Documents pane.
    -There should have finer-grained controls animation controls dependent on the specific animation. Like pinwheel should have separate options for the number of blades (which can be any number), the direction, and whether it is horizontal or vertical. “Hexagon” should be “Polygon” with an arbitrary number of sides, arbitrary rotation, and whether it goes in, out, or in+out (the latter case could, for instance, replace double diamond).
    -Slide masters should be a separate pane, like the layouts pane, so you can more easily apply masters to individual slides.

    A bit more “out there”, but have you looked at this:
    http://lizards.opensuse.org/2010/06/11/zippl-a-lightweigth-presentation-tool/

    I think this tool is a very cool way of doing presentations. I think either integrating something like this into impress or having a separate koffice-based presentation program like this would be great. Basically, as I see it, instead of just a list of slides in a particular order, you have a space that includes slides in a 2D layout. The slides would have connections between each other, and the program would move between them along those connections. Each slide would have a “Default” connection to the next slide, and this default series of connections would be played out if the user starts and runs the presentation normally. But by clicking on objects in the slides the show follows alternate connections. Also, you would be able to zoom out and see all the slides to select a new slide, or even to draw a series of connections between slides on-the-fly in the middle of the slideshow to change the order.

  • dipesh says:
    22 July 2010 at 18 h 48 min

    and my ideas/wishes;
    1. Fix jumping of the dockers if tools are switched.
    2. Provide a better default what tools are visible/enabled per default so the KPresenter MainWindow does need to be 2048×2048 or so.
    3. Fix variables

  • Lukas says:
    23 July 2010 at 0 h 40 min

    LESS IS MORE :)

    Arrange widget:
    * Align left | center | right buttons should be combined into single button using drop-down menu when clicking/hovering icon. Same to Align top.
    * In case of send forward | backwards | … clicking it should do last time used action, clicking arrow display all options.

    Shapes:
    * If “Shapes” widget is replaced by “Add shapes” (nice solution, in deed), why it’s still where? :)

    External display:
    * When external display is connected while KPresenter is running, it would be nice it it could detect it and setup everything for us: Set external display leftOf (not clone), in presenter settings set it as a presentation output etc.

    Design:
    * I don’t know how hard it would be, but I hope to see a changed theme of all KOffice apps. GWenview is a great example how elegantly app could look like :)

  • Lukas says:
    23 July 2010 at 1 h 00 min

    Oh I forgot the most important one:
    Promote using Styles instead of manual bold / 52 /fancy font settings. One of the most annoying thing when finishing presentations is having to go around all slides cheching if formatting is consistent.

    I would even argue for allowing changing color/size/etc only in layout+styles edit mode, in “regular” presentation editing mode allowing to select only from Important | Quote | Heading | Author | etc + custom styles. I hope we are out of ’01 era, when more colors in slides was equal o the coolness of the presentation.

    This, of course requires recreating styles widget some preview, where you can visually identify , how one or another style would look like.

    —–

    BRANDING and PATCHING templates.

    A killer feature would be to be able to create a personal patches (via wizard or something), that could be auto-applied on any theme. E.g. replacing placeholder with company name / adding custom footer (e.g. with your initials), changing font family in all styles / transition settings. For people having to deal with lots of presentation,it could save an entire day in a year period.

  • Akhmad Fathonih says:
    23 July 2010 at 4 h 44 min

    What I really want from a presentation app is let-it-be-the-designer. My design skill is crap. No matter how hard I tried, my presentation will still ends up like a crap. I’ve been enjoying Powerpoint’s smart graphic feature. It let me add content without the design chores. Never use Keynote before but I bet they have similar feature.

    Just my two cents

  • Mich; says:
    23 July 2010 at 8 h 33 min

    have a look at this enhancement request
    http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=241520

  • TheBlackCat says:
    23 July 2010 at 20 h 38 min

    I know this isn’t its original purpose, but I think using MPRIS (the media player control interface used by various Linux media players like XMMS and Amarok) for kpresenter controls would actually work very well. The forward and back buttons could be used to move backwards and forwards in slides, the play and pause could be used for starting and pausing a timed slideshow, length and current position information could be used to display how far you are through the slideshow in a progress bar, and if MPRIS supports album art it could be used to provide a thumbnail of the current slide.

    This would allow standard media player interfaces, like plasma widgets, remote control software, keyboard shortcut, and so on to control your presentation without needing to change anything.

  • joob says:
    26 July 2010 at 0 h 15 min

    I often have to include pictures and graphics in my presentations. So far, I have not found a way to crop images in kpresenter. For me, this is a very important feature. PPT is making this very easy, while impress only has a clunky interface for cropping images.

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