Thursday, June 16, 2011

GSoC 2011: Calligra Stage Project an update

Hello planet!. Sorry, I don't write very often, but now I finally found time to present a short summary of the progress on my project. By the time I worked in the slide sorter of Calligra Stage, implementing new features and refactoring some code. Here is a video showing some new features which I have been working on (a video is better than a description of the work and save me writing time :) )


 


I welcome your comments and suggestions... until the next progress report ...

7 comments:

  1. Great! This is pretty much exactly what I was hoping for.

    I do have a few suggestions if they aren't already on your to-do list (or already done)

    1. I would add a second button on hover for show/hide the slide in the slide show. hidden slides would be desaturated (partially grayed out) and would have lighter text.

    2. Either on hover or permanently I would put the current slide number on each slide.

    3. If it isn't already possible. users should be able to click on the page title to edit it.

    4. If it isn't already, it should be possible to copy and paste the slide master using the formatting paintbrush.

    5. I would put the "slide sorter" button in the Documents panel, hide the documents panel when the slide sorter is shown, and turn the "notes" button to a toggle button that would show the notes either in the slide sorter or the current view.

    6. I would use the same underlying code for the slide masters and slide layouts, to the extent possible, if you have time.

    Some of these may be already planned, already done, outside the scope of the project, or just bad ideas. Feel free to take them or leave them as you see fit.

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  2. Thank you. At the moment this is not a finished work and there are still many things to do, so your comments are helpful.

    Answering each of your points:

    1. I'm working on a tool to create custom presentations that I think would fulfill that function (the custom slide shows UI will be integrated into the slides sorter, but I will talk about that new feature in future posts)​​.

    2. I think the best approach is to attach the slide number to the name, so I will try that.

    3. I had forgotten that point but by sure, I will work on a mechanism for editing the names (now double-click on the name or the slide takes you back to normal view).

    4. I think it would be a nice feature, but is beyond the scope of the current project. Still I take note of your idea for future work.

    5. The position of the button "slide sorter" is only temporary. I plan to locate it on the documents dock, but I'm still evaluating alternatives. (I'm not sure if hide the documents dock is consistent with the expected behaviour of a dock, so I have to think alternatives).

    6. Much of the code is already reusable for other views, but I still have to work on that point.

    Thanks again, all feedback is welcome

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  3. Ooooo.... Drag 'n' drop across windows...

    Shiny :)

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  4. For 1, compared to the custom presentation tool this would be a quicker and easier way to temporarily remove slides without having to go through the hassle of setting up a complete custom slide show. OpenOffice, at least, allows you to both make custom slide show and to show/hide individual slides, and I think for many basic tasks (like hiding extra slides) the show/hide slide function is much easier.

    For 5, I was thinking there would be a animation where the documents panel expands to fill the area. This would make it clear. Currently the documents panel just wastes space when the slide sorter is open.

    Otherswise, great! (except for 4, which I thought would likely be the case but I thought I would bring it up just in case)

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  5. In the first video, after moving the three slides to a new position, the selection is lost (i.e. only one of them is selected afterwards).

    I think this would not only be annoying for the user, but also makes it more difficult to see that the "move" operation was successful.

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  6. toddrme2178: For point 1. I hadn't used that feature in LibreOffice before, so I didn't understand your point before. Anyway I'll see if I can add that feature.
    Anonymous: Thanks, I hadn't noticed that problem, but is now fixed.

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