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.

Just my two cents

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.

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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.

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

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.

KOffice:
-Better support for tables