Oct 10
11

A slides sorter in KPresenter

As you may know, KOffice is on the way to release its 2.3 version. The presentation application of the suite, KPresenter, will embbed a really necessary feature for an end user application which is the slides sorter. A slides sorter view is a window that displays thumbnail versions of all your slides, arranged in horizontal rows. This view is useful to make global changes to several slides at one time. Rearranging slides is easy to do in Slides Sorter view.

As you can see on the screenshots, it is really nice to be able to see the whole presentation on a unique window. Then, you can move all the slides by draging and droping the thumbnail.

Hope you’ll enjoy it.

Tags: KDE, KOffice, KPresenter, morice-net

This entry was posted on 11 October 2010 at 22 h 41 min. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in KDE KOffice by morice-net 11 Comments

Boudewijn Rempt says:

11 October 2010 at 23 h 56 min

Cool stuff!

S. says:

12 October 2010 at 0 h 15 min

Hi,

Silly question: what app did you use to arrange the screenshots in that picture? I know there was a Qt app for that purpose making the rounds a while ago but I can’t for the life of me remember its name…

TheBlackCat says:

12 October 2010 at 3 h 16 min

Great to see!

A few questions:

1. Why is the slide list on the left still visible when the slide sorter is up?

2. By the presence of arrows in the slide list on the left, but not on the left, is it safe to assume drag-and-drop has been implemented in the slide sorter but not in the slide list panel?

3. Does the zoom slider on the lower-right control the slide size in the sorter?

4. Why do we need a separate slide sorter? I would think it would be more convenient to have a button that would expand the slide list on the left into a slide sorter, then pushing the button again to collapse it back into a small panel. This would actually be pretty helpful with many of the panels, come to think of it.

This might have the advantage of at least giving users the option of setting the zoom of the slides in the slide list, allowing them to have 2 or 3 rows of slides if they wish (or more, but much more than that and it becomes hard to see).

wbk says:

12 October 2010 at 11 h 04 min

Off-topic, but would it be feasible to assign duration to the slides and building on that a timeline for the presentation?

(I thought I saw something like that on the thumbnail of the sorter window on the right, until I clicked on the thumbnail and saw they were the numbers of the slides instead of a timeline)

SeaJey says:

12 October 2010 at 11 h 56 min

>what app did you use to arrange the screenshots in that picture?

http://code.google.com/p/screenie/

morice-net says:

12 October 2010 at 12 h 28 min

Hey guys, thank you all for your comments.

First, easy things…

> >what app did you use to arrange the screenshots in that picture?
>http://code.google.com/p/screenie/

Yes, this is a cool app, I’ll use it the next time. By hand it takes too much time, even if I have an artist soul

Then, TheBlackCat :
Your comment is really interesting, and seems to be the user point of view. It is sometimes refreshing for the developers to see that kind of answers: it could give us ideas.
2. >> So, yes, the sorting on the document docker works but it is very hard to get right. That’s why the slides sorter was needed.
3. >> Not yet, but it would great to have it working… nice feature to implement.

The first and the fourth points could grouped into one. I am pretty sure the idea is excellent and it would great to have it into KPresenter for some dockers. I am also sure that it would be awful to have it on some other dockers. In fact, to be honest it is not the idea that is missing but the time. This feature would need a pretty big refactoring and there are still some end user missing features. So the priority are on the missing features, not on the docker refactoring for now. But this idea is now written and will make something great to have in the (not so long) future.

That’s kind of the same answer for you wbk, nice to have, in the future Some works have been done on the time on features, and a full mode is dedicated to that. IMHO, I think that should be generalized: the user should have the possibility to control the time.

Thank you all!