Introducing…Glide! Presentations for GNOME
April 20, 2010
This semester, with the (unfortunately blogless) Amy Wieliczka, I’ve been working sponsored by the Rennselaer Center for Open Source Software, on a project called Glide.
Excuse my broken GTK theme…
Glide is a Clutter/GTK based presentation application. I could go on for ages complaining about presentation applications, but um…maybe later, for now Glide is still a baby.
The code is on GNOME git, and, there is a fair amount there, and in fact, I think you could play with it today, using backgrounds+text/image elements, and some pretty Slide transitions, and probably make something a little more satisfying than you would in open office present. Build it, try it out. email me (racarr AT gnome), etc, etc…
Glide however is still in rapid development, within the next few weeks, there will likely be major changes. Probably an overhaul of the animations system, add a timeline editor for laying out transitions. An implementation of PDF export that doesn’t cheat. A templating/themeing system, along with an archive file format (containing all resources needed by the presentation! hoorah!). Then probably another pass over the UI…after this I’d like there to be some sort of 0.1 release.
Anyway, I’ve been putting off this post, and want to get it written…so…I’m going to leave it here. Thanks to Professor Moorthy and Sean O’ Sullivan for RCOS, a program which has perhaps been one of the defining experiences of my career as a student at RPI.
April 20, 2010 at 10:38 am
please tell me it uses *.ODP as its native format.
April 20, 2010 at 11:22 am
I just tried to build it, and configure complained about missing clutter-gtk-0.90.
But I could not find such a version : http://www.clutter-project.org/sources/clutter-gtk/
Ubuntu 10.04 comes with clutter-gtk-0.10, so I modified configure.ac and now it builds/installs/runs successfully.
April 20, 2010 at 11:51 am
It’s good to see more work on Office app. Keep up good work 🙂
April 20, 2010 at 12:09 pm
A few notes WRT to the repository, especially the po dir:
please remove .intltool-merge-cache, Makefile, POTFILES and stamp-it files from it, they are unnecessary as they should be autogenerated…
April 20, 2010 at 12:09 pm
This is really exciting and I hope that something useful and mature will grow out of it. After the now dead criawips, it would be great to have something to complement Abiword and Gnumeric in Gnome Office.
April 20, 2010 at 12:15 pm
awesome! Can’t wait for this to hit Ubuntu 🙂
April 20, 2010 at 12:17 pm
This is great!
OpenOffice.org sucks so bad. I’ve been looking for a simple presentation tool for ever. Let me know if you need an icon. 🙂
April 20, 2010 at 12:25 pm
Very cool. Will it be like Keynote?
But why did you use C instead of Python or Vala? I really fear that this will be abandoned at some point, because C is not really for app development and finding people maintaining a C codebase will be hard in a few years.
April 20, 2010 at 12:35 pm
Very interesting project indeed!
Have you considered coming to GUADEC 2010 in The Hague and presenting your project there in a lightning talk? (Full paper submissions are closed already, sorry!)
April 20, 2010 at 1:02 pm
“with an archive file format”
Do you plan to use the OpenDocument ODP format?
April 20, 2010 at 2:04 pm
You should remove po/Makefile and po/Makefile.in from git and update the configure.ac file with the dependency on Clutter 1.2 (not 1.0)
April 20, 2010 at 3:09 pm
Awesome!
I look forward to seeing a demo and trying it out.
One of the things that I think presentation tools really, really need is a way to look at a whole bunch of slides and pick and choose (drag and drop) some of them into a new presentation. While keeping the whole set available.
April 20, 2010 at 3:33 pm
It is great to see this project. Thanks a lot for it. BTW I’ve started having a quick look at the code and as minor thing, there are some files with gpl 3 and others as 2.
April 20, 2010 at 3:59 pm
Great idea! This is the thing that GNOME lacks most currently.
I hope to be hearing from it soon.
April 20, 2010 at 4:04 pm
if you want some ideas of layout and animations:
http://watchwolf.fr/public/Eyelight/eyelight.mpeg4
it’s a quite sexy presentation tool written with the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (http://www.enlightenment.org/), completely themable.
April 20, 2010 at 4:20 pm
Any plans for a video or flash export that isn’t rubbish 🙂 openoffice goes to flash but loses animations.
April 20, 2010 at 4:23 pm
Do exists a clutter-gtk-0.90 package? Perhaps it is clutter-gtk-0.9?
Or even better: what about switch to clutter-gtk-0.10?
April 20, 2010 at 7:26 pm
Some time ago I did a program which allowed to export a presentation (plus the audio recorded during the conference) to Flash, to allow people to put them in their webs using less bandwidth and having better quality than a video, but it’s quite old, so…
What do you think about allowing to export to SVG+HTML, plus a little of JavaScript to do the transitions and the AUDIO tag from HTML5 for the audio? Or directly using the CANVAS tag.
April 20, 2010 at 11:45 pm
Looks cool- I plan to try it out for my GUADEC talk.
Along the lines of what Robin said, it’d be great if the data format were standard- either something like odp, or better something like HTML5 that didn’t require export.
April 21, 2010 at 1:21 am
Holy shit. You are a hero. You have no idea how badly we need a nice, simple and efficient gnome-centric tool like this for making presentations! Actually you probably do 😉
Just want to make an early feature request. The only killer feature I *need* (which makes me use OOo Impress) is the “presenter console”: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Presenter_Screen
It’s the key to making impressive, zen-style presentations, and avoiding “death by powerpoint”.
Cheers!
April 21, 2010 at 6:33 am
Oh, I love the effort to create a new Presentation Software, I think the office software should be more divided and therefore this is a wonderful project.
Perhaps it could be something to linux, as Keynote is to Mac OSX.
April 21, 2010 at 7:24 am
Exciting. I was just thinking about a Clutter powered presentation tool a few days ago. I was wondering why you did not use Seed for this? It seems like a good fit for a C-core with Seed on top?
April 21, 2010 at 7:32 am
I get a segfault when I run it from the src/ dir. Admittedly I bumped clutter-gtk to 0.10 since that’s what I have here – which might be at fault. Here’s the bt:
Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
IA__g_str_hash (v=0x0) at /build/buildd/glib2.0-2.24.0/glib/gstring.c:134
134 /build/buildd/glib2.0-2.24.0/glib/gstring.c: No such file or directory.
in /build/buildd/glib2.0-2.24.0/glib/gstring.c
(gdb) bt
#0 IA__g_str_hash (v=0x0) at /build/buildd/glib2.0-2.24.0/glib/gstring.c:134
#1 0xb75234f8 in g_hash_table_lookup_node (hash_table=0x8424a30, key=0x0) at /build/buildd/glib2.0-2.24.0/glib/ghash.c:309
#2 IA__g_hash_table_lookup (hash_table=0x8424a30, key=0x0) at /build/buildd/glib2.0-2.24.0/glib/ghash.c:898
#3 0xb7b76ec8 in ?? () from /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
#4 0xb7b7580b in gtk_action_group_get_action () from /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
#5 0xb7b7584a in ?? () from /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
#6 0xb7b75a08 in gtk_action_group_add_action_with_accel () from /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
#7 0x08054e2f in glide_window_add_accelerator (w=, group=0xb7eddff4, accels=0x8421c78, action=0x8064303 “new-action”, accel=0x80642f8 “n”) at glide-window.c:1325
#8 0x0805523b in glide_window_setup_accelerators (window=0x8420000) at glide-window.c:1335
#9 glide_window_load_ui (window=0x8420000) at glide-window.c:1378
#10 glide_window_init (window=0x8420000) at glide-window.c:1551
#11 0xb76019c2 in IA__g_type_create_instance (type=135009912) at /build/buildd/glib2.0-2.24.0/gobject/gtype.c:1885
#12 0xb75e5a18 in g_object_constructor (type=135009912, n_construct_properties=2, construct_params=0x80c2050) at /build/buildd/glib2.0-2.24.0/gobject/gobject.c:1396
#13 0xb75e6c4c in IA__g_object_newv (object_type=135009912, n_parameters=0, parameters=0x0) at /build/buildd/glib2.0-2.24.0/gobject/gobject.c:1261
#14 0xb75e7a48 in IA__g_object_new (object_type=135009912, first_property_name=0x0) at /build/buildd/glib2.0-2.24.0/gobject/gobject.c:1092
#15 0x08054d9b in glide_window_new () at glide-window.c:1572
#16 0x080529fd in main (argc=1, argv=0xbffff4b4) at main.c:139
April 21, 2010 at 11:42 am
Cool! I am eagerly looking forward to trying Glide.
Will you please provide instructions on compiling it?
A list of dependencies will also help.
April 30, 2010 at 11:34 am
So the GSoc for “Ease” will reimplement this in Vala? Do you talk to each other? Why not have a GSoc for Glide?