Man, Nathan got me thinking about the whole lack of a killer presentation app in Open Source. I used to use purely Inkscape’s viewing app, Inkview for all my presentation needs, but that becomes cumbersome when you give a talk nearly 3-5 times a week 
Hard to pull together a talk in a cab with that option too. The graphics though aren’t full of jaggies, and it demonstrates a much better app IMO, Inkscape, duh!
So I started using OpenOffice.org Impress, which I’m still using to this day. But, I got pissed off yesterday in watching Lessig present, a young Korean kid asked me which app Lessig and Wilbanks used, and I shamefully said, “Keynote.”
So, to the lazyweb first: Am I missing something? Is there a good up and coming free and open source Presentation Application that doesn’t suck? My definition of doesn’t suck includes:
- Handles all media types! - I need to be able to play any video, any audio file, mp3s, etc…
- Is fast! Graphically!
- Has 3D badazzzz effects like Compiz, but primarily professional video style effects
- I even want it to be as cinematic as Ken Burns style zooming effects over an entire presentation
- Simple UI
- All of Nathan’s reasons
So here are some final questions:
Would clutter-based system be good for this? And/or, what file type would be best for this slide format: ODF?
I have come to the end of my minimalist style of presentations now here in Seoul Korea at the 1st International CC Korea conference. I have done tons of them. I want some action.
Create a very nice cross plateform (opengl based?) player for odf files and add some sexier transitions to open office impress menus and you’ll be set. Open office is somewhat decent to create slides (much better than powerpoint imho). What makes keynote so great are the themes and nice visual effects. This could be done with an enhanced slide player. Or not… Or allow inkscape to have multiple slides and transitions between them and animation. Isn’t it what svg can be used for? Or allow impress to import and display nicely animated svg files for maximum flexibility
You should check this presentation app http://www.nongnu.org/criawips/. It’s GNOME, simple BUT seems to be unmaintained for a while. Maybe it can be used as a codebase for your new clutter app.
Manslide may be a solution.
There is also huge progress landing in the next version of Impress (3D effects and Presenter Mode, voice recording)
Clutter would be perfect for it.
There is a sample with clutter source, a clutter-gstreamer-xml based slide player, with some example of cool slides transition…
I generally use OpenOffice Impress or other graphics editor, plus KeyJNote for managing the effects…
But, I agree! We need something better…!
I usually create (image and text only) presentations with Oo and export them to pdf, then I play them with evince. I use a custom script based on GNOME a11y to check the current evince presentation page and a text file to invoke mplayer and play videos/music
And what about LaTeX / Beamer ?
This produces the best result I ever saw, in a PDF file that can be rendered on every OS.
Of course it requires a little time to learn it, but isn’t it tottaly worth it ?
Perhaps KPresenter could form a nice base to start the project? KDE/Qt code tends to be reasonably easy to hack on, particularly compared to OpenOffice.
Just got back from pycon. About half the presenters used keynote, the other’s seemed to be using s5. I used s5, because it is so easy to create slides with restructured text and use the rst2s5.py tool. rST is very easy to use and edit. S5 is a little too simplistic and more powerpointy than keynoty (ie requires titles on all slides). Also it doesn’t scale images, so that is problematic when dealing with pictures and different projector resolutions.
I’ve seen Jeff Waugh present using clutter and the slides were wonderful. Perhaps an rst2clutter tool is needed. I need to check out clutter more seriously, if only I had more time….
Bruce[0] is another one to check out. Has some 3d since it is based on the python opengl wrapper, pyglet. Doesn’t appear to have rst support at the moment….
0 - http://code.google.com/p/bruce-tpt/wiki/AboutBruce
http://www.oooninja.com/2008/02/eye-candy-3d-opengl-transitions-impress.html
Maybe this is something you are looking for…
I also heard of a great way to present with linux destop…
I heard somebody made a script which created X virtual desktops each with new slide as s wallpaper and then used compiz cube to go from one to another…
Something using xrandr for dual-screen would be useful.
The laptop display would show the current slide with speaker notes and a running clock, whereas the laptop’s VGA/DVI output which drives the projector only shows the slides.
it would be useful to be able to export to high res video
i would like to be able to use the new 3d effects in open office but unless i’m able to convert to something that can play on windows systems it’s not much use to me
Scenari is a new player and has some nice solutions
it exports stuff as flash for visual experience
download a demo pack of main tools
http://scenari-platform.org/projects/scenari/en/demo/co/
most worthy for presentations are SSS and WebRadio
Cool, looks like openoffice 2.4 is out now…I will test out and see if this fits the bill…I’m thinking even deeper about how cool a clutter-based app could be…I want to include browser components, live data and more directly in OO.o…and what about movies?
http://www.oooninja.com/2008/02/eye-candy-3d-opengl-transitions-impress.html