Hello Planet!
This blog post is about a new kind of presentation in Calligra Stage which I will be implementing as my project for Google Summer of Code.
The conventional style of presentation is a slideshow. But this paradigm is one in which thoughts are presented in a linear fashion. But certain presentations need the flow of thought to be shown more clearly. You would want to present your ideas in the manner that they occurred to you.
This feature will create for the user a single canvas on which he can add his ideas anywhere in the form of images or text (and videos in future?)
The user can jot down the content of the presentation on the canvas and mark out sections of the canvas as ‘frames’. The presentation will proceed from one frame to the next by spatial movements and rotations. Different zooming levels can be set for each frames: you can emphasize on a point and then zoom in to show the details.
You could even have frames within frame within frames. Think of it as zooming into a particular rectangular section of a ‘slide’ so that it fills up the screen. And then zooming inside that new section again into another section/frame. And so on and so forth. 😉
The presentation will essentially be an animated SVG and can be played in any browser that supports SVGs. The animations can be done using either SMIL (SVG’s own implementation of declarative animations) or Javascript – the js code can be embedded inside an SVG’s XML.
Kevin Ottens used a single canvas SVG presentation at the KDE4.6 release party at Toulouse, France this March.
Similar presentations can be made online at Prezi; but these use flash
Right now, the community bonding period has started; I’m using this time to to get familiar with the community, the code base, and have started working on adding support for exporting a text shape to an SVG. This had been filed as a bug here.
Horses and Cherries 
Awesome project – I look forward to making a presentation using it in the near future :).
Very good. Looking forward to using it. 🙂
good idea, I have 1 suggestion give the possibility of making some objects exclusive of a single frame, because in your example, if you fist give a big picture and then zoom in to give details, you don’t want all the little unreadable letters to be shown in the big picture, and it also makes it easier to add arrows with explanation of stuff after zooming in.
Also what about making some simple effects, a “zoom in” effect and a fade effect for appearing, previously hidden objects?