Thursday, May 26, 2011

GSoC 2011: Improve of slides management in Calligra Stage. An introduction

Calligra Stage
Hello KDE Planet! 

I am Paul, and I study computer science. I will work this GSoC on Calligra Stage (http://www.calligra-suite.org/stage/). Stage is the presentation application of Calligra Suite. 
As you know an important part in a Presentation application are tools for the management of slides (I mean those that let you manage your slides represented by thumbnails). 
The aim of my project is to improve the usability and consistency of three of these tools, which despite having different goals can share a lot of functionality. These tools are the docker in the normal view (at right of the first screenshot), the slides sorter view and the dialog that allows you to create custom presentations.



Some of the features that I plan to add include full support for drag&drop (this feature is currently present only in the slides sorter view, and lets you select one slide at a time), buttons to select the slides in a Dolphin style (the green + or red – button on the thumbnails), support for zoom, contextual menus, among others.
An important part of my work will be the rewrite of the tool for create custom presentations, which I expect will greatly improve usability (I will discuss the details in a future posts).

Finally, I expect your suggestions, what other aspects of the UI of these tools would you like to see changed and how?

Until the next post ... and good luck to everybody working on their GSoC  projects!

3 comments:

  1. Hi

    Something I think would be great to have is a non-linear type of presentation interface.

    For example, check out:
    http://prezi.com/

    I know for myself that I often go back and forth a lot during presentations since there are a number of "forks" in the talk...

    Normally I just present using a PDF though, because then I know that even the Windows machines used at most places will be able to render stuff correctly.

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  2. Sure, and you can be happy because there is already a GSoC student working in that, more information:
    http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/project/google/gsoc2011/aakriti_gupta/22001
    http://community.kde.org/GSoC/2011/Ideas#Project:_Single-canvas_Presentation_Mode_.28like_Prezi_or_Zippl.29

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  3. It's awesome you're reworking the current mess. I must tell you I'm the author of such mess :-). It was not meant to go final, but I never got to actually cleaning it out.

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