A new addition to the animations -> styles project!

It feels good to know that you're making an impact, right?

I've just found out that the project of adding animations to styles, would also include fixing this issue: http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=73090

Interesting argument if it's a bug or not, huh? :) Well it definitely is, and fixing it would contribute to the ultimate goal of the project - make attaching animations easier.

All the talk about what Powerpoint has, and how long it's been stabilizing the feature, makes me wonder - why do we care?? People use iWork cause it's pretty and shiny. People use Google docs cause it's free, portable, doesn't require installation, and gets things done. I think that slowly everything's coming down just to the ease of use and appearance, and as stupid as it might be, so far - I really like how the go-oo splash screen looks in Windows - pretty. Oh and the document recovery is a charm. + the regex search.

Making the GUI

I'm just thinking - could it be just as simple as fitting this:

into this:

???

Hmm. If the GUI in OOo works anything similar to the one in Swing, then it should be a piece of cake!

Attaching animations to styles

Why? Cause sometimes we want all our slide titles to make a grand entrance.

I also noticed that the project is part of the education project:

Attach Impress Animations to Styles

< Education Project | Effort | Improve Impress

The title says it all.

Steps:

• discover how are managed styles in the code
• define a design for the Impress one
• Implement a proof of concept
• Improve

• Reguired skills/knowledge: C++, familiarity with UNO is a plus.

Familiarity with UNO...mmmm :( Not here unfortunately. Luckily I should be able to learn at as I go.

What tickles my brain here is - is it possible that I would be allowed to redesign the Impress styles, internally?? Separate them to be Impress specific??! Wow! Now that would be something to talk about back in class : "You know, that heading 1 you just picked - I made class for it! " If the whole class would be redesigned - then it would be easier to add on the animations to it. I don't know why I thought they're already Impress specific cause now when I think about it - it doesn't really make sense :)

Learning about Master pages

I've never had the need to make a complicated presentation, so never used Master Pages before. After today, I see now how they're absolutely necessary when making something more than my 10-slides-long-school-presentation.

The reason for me investigating this, is cause I'm thinking about applying for a go-oo GSoC project. Project details (copied from the go-oo page):

Make Impress master pages copyable

Currently, when in master page edit mode, the slide sorter has cut/copy/paste disabled. The task would be to add this missing functionality, and correctly handle masterpage-attached styles.

Required skills/knowledge

c++

Difficulty

easy

Contact

thb at openoffice.org

Took me a while to figure out what the author here meant! Apparently there's two slide sorters - the obvious one named Slide Sorter, and the left nav containing little previews of slides - that's also the slide sorter.

As soon I was explained this by the friendly mentor - I realized the problem - The master pages aren't copyable, which can be quite a pain when you're eager to create your own and not using the built-in ones.

Here's an interesting article about Master pages:

http://openoffice.blogs.com/bookresources/chapters/book_impressmasterpages.pdf

It seems like this issue is bugging quite a few people:

bug tracker:

http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=70587

wishlist:

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Education_Project/Effort/Improve_Impress/Impress_Master_Copyable

forum:

http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=27162

It seems that the code that copies slides is quite complicated itself - so my next task is to get on debugging it to figure it out...