So, what happened… in the last months I gave some talks about Ubuntu and Free Software, and I thought a lot about presentations, about the tools we use and how they can be improved.

I’m not happy with any of the opensource slide tool I used so far. The main argument is that they all *pretend* to have a linear flow of the conversation, while my speeches are almost never linear: I like to underline some concept announced before, or announce some other things I’ll speak about a few minutes later.

Think about that: almost always we follow an index, how many times every of us have to cut and paste it in some other position of the presentation, in order to start the next argument? Well, don’t know about *you*, but *I* do, and a lot of times.

Moreover, repeating things (with care, of course ) helps the comprehension of the listeners, and repeated concepts will be better memorized.

Also putting things in a pattern that resemble the reality helps understand and keep in memory what you said. Probably, if you’re talking about the GNOME stack you don’t absolutely want to just list the subsystems included, but you’d like to have something like a graphics and you’d like to focalize on each argument at a time.

That said: the only thing that fullfifth my wishes is prezi, but unfortunately that’s a closed/flash-based tool. Prezi is IMHO supercool, fast, and simple enough to create a presentation in few minutes (with a clear idea of what you want ).

So, I and a bunch of other Andreas  took the decision to wrote something that will be opensource, cool and easy to use. Well, it’s far to be complete and to be…aehm… “visually pleasant”, but it’s still growing.

The project is here, and I don’t hide that we need developers.

The status of the project is far from complete: but you can currently take an .svg built by Inkscape or any vectorial editor, use A4 to set a path in the presentation (like the prezi-style), and use A4 as a player for that presentation. We are developing a simple editor (we don’t want to re-implement another SVG graphics editor at all), and this is in progress.

Another thing we are currently evaluating is which framework use:  so, we have the default player written in gtk+librsvg+cairo, and a test branch written with the Qt Framework that use also an OpenGL renderer.

Probably, a graphical demonstrations is better than thousands of words, and (I hope that) will follow soon

But at that time, you can try it out with the daily builds (not actually daily, we trigger them by hands )

Just install the package along with its dependencies, and try out one of the test images inside /usr/share/a4/tests/images.

We hope you enjoy it !

I’m not here to write about what we did, and how good and brave we are, but to share a thought: a really positive point is the collaboration started between Italian Debian and Ubuntu communities.

We hope that it’ll be a long, interesting collaboration and with a significative gain in both direction.

In the bag of our successes, we can include also the “ubuntuized-dpl”:  in order to wear a badge, we achieved to attach an “Ubuntu string” onto Zack .

For a really quick look, have a read on his conclusions.

Is it perhaps a well-known argument? Well, maybe I’m wrong, but don’t seems so, cause I actually found  a lot of code that use super() without (*args,**kw)  and such: going fix it.

Anyone can take it, test it and report any problems to me, considering that’s not in my higher priorities, though…

I dismissed Smile ITP, since I decided I don’t want to “officially package” smile, for a number of reasons (one of which is that I’m not using it anymore). Smile is currently in a “repositories limbo”, and so it’s out of both Debian and Ubuntu archives, thought it’s at least in four other different places: my ppa, Marillat’s repository, getdeb.net and revu (not considering the outdated one linked on smile homepage).

This piece of software definitely needs some love, and people willing to help can take our work and submit it to have eventually an official package… I said “our” as probably you’d want to contact Matthias as well, which uploaded it to GetDeb and worked with me. Or even better, you can talk with Marillat, and resurrect Debian Smile ITP.