PowerPoint's old push-down transition has done its 15 years of service, and it's time for it to retire. Do the sleepy faces in your meetings agree? OpenOffice.org Impress 2.4 has the answer in the form ten 3D OpenGL-rendered transitions:
- Flipping tiles
- Outside turning cube
- Revolving circles
- Turning helix
- Inside turning cube
- Fall
- Turn around
- Iris
- Turn down
- Rochade
Shane M. Mathews developed this feature under the Google Summer of Code 2007 program with mentors Thorsten Behrens of Sun Microsystems (at the time) and Radek Doulík of Novell. Radek explains:
[t]he actual transitions implementation is not the whole work, there was much more work to make it behave nicely inside of OOo. Shane wrote the whole transitional framework, Thorsten made all the necessary changes in sd and slideshow modules to make it happen, I was updating canvas backends to get slides content. Most probably more things I forgot.
There are also more transitions coming, we have now 2 new 3D transitions (3D Venetian blinds hor/vert) and some replacements for 2D transitions for better performance.
Videos
Alternatively, you can also download the video above Ogg Vorbis + Theora or DivX AVI in 640x480. The stutter is the fault of the recording software, but the transitions actually play smoothly in OpenOffice.org. The photos are from Pear Biter, Joto25, Wili, Eschipul, Louisa Hennessy, Matthew Fang, Gari Baldi, and Darwin Bell. The music is Cellule by Silence.
The slides above are from Peter Norvig's The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation. His essay which explains the satire of PowerPoint.
Drivers and X.org fussiness
Though you do not actually have to install or use Compiz, both OpenOffice.org and Compiz have the same demanding requirements of your video drivers and X server setup. Check Compiz.org for tips on setting up your system. On my main computer, which can't run Compiz because of its low-power onboard video card, I suffered unmapped textures (white objects) and application crashes. The videos were captured on a Dell Latitude D820 with nVidia G72M (GeForce Go7400) and 256MB video memory using the nVidia 169.09 binary driver.
Availability for download
The 3D transitions feature will be generally available in OpenOffice.org 2.4—but only for Linux. The upstream OpenOffice.org edition will package the feature as an extension. Other editions of OpenOffice.org, such as OxygenOffice and Go-Oo, may include integrate the feature.
There is no ETA for porting the 3D transitions to Windows, and do not expect the feature in OpenOffice.org 2.4 for Windows.
Update
April 24: "Where is the OpenGL 3D extension for Impress?" (download instructions)
Comments
Once it's done, you can call it Keynote 1.0 and release it in 2003. :D
So, yes it's not Apple's Keynote, but then what's their R&D expenditure compared a student in the SoC?
And if you really feel passionate about better transitions:
a) Submit constructive ideas
b) Or better help out coding.
Otherwise STFU. Don't just flat out piss over someone's effort, whatever the size of its improvement to an Open Source project.
@Andrew: "Apple is too...uniform...cliquey...uni-brain" ... Its also here, today, and it works, and does everything that 'linux on the desktop' crowd have been crowing on about for years that 'they will have'.
That said, I use Ubuntu 7.10 for my development machine and its solid. OSS has come a long way since I was downloading SLS disks with a 0.98 kernel.
OOO in particular is reaching the point where it is a viable alternative for 99% of potential users out there, and thats good enough for me. If I was starting a new company, and had to roll out desktop OSs and application suits to them, I'd be using Ubuntu + OOO.
Very nice and important for presentantions :D
Can't wait.
But the point is, that PowerPoint doesn't have it, and has been a terrible program from the start. So OpenOffice could improve by becoming faster for one, but also by providing cool features that you don't have in microsoft office.
You can't rely on everyone having a mac, so you can view your keynote presentation, but having an openoffice presentation and showing it to everyone is a whole lot closer now...
I think firefox 3 is making a big step forward, hope openoffice will also make such a step...
linux: Now just type in a few command make compile configure and voila easy as building your own software. now submit any bugs you find.
microsoft: Where do want to go today? virus alert -crash reboot- Do you want viagra?
I thought that would be funny I'll take the compiling any day.
That said, that looks damn cool. Can't wait to get it.
Hopefully it'll be available for non-linux platforms in a point release update, and that a stand-alone player will be available for Impress that will incorporate this feature.
Keep up the great work!
Mal
One way to AA on all graphics cards would be to use the texture AA-ing.
- Create an image larger than the actual powerpoint slide
- This image should border that image at all sides
- Set the alpha of this image to 0, and copy the source image into this new image
When showing the slideshow, ensure that the alpha borders are off-screen ( so the source image is still showing on the extents of the screen ).
Now, when you rotate the slide plane, you should get the texture AA effect.
Of course, this is easy for single large images - when you break the transition into smaller areas, each of these would need a separate border.
Hope that helps! Keep up the great work, and make it easy to add new transitions ( also please push for WinDoze and Mac support in OO for an official release )
For people complaining, this is step 1 of a few steps.
Is there a repo for this?
Hey, it now seems it is between MAC, and OpenOffice.
When was the last time that we haven't seen a good video?
I'd like to see it done using Linux, and an opensource app.
Cool!
www.jjmacey.net/blog
Nowadays you'd have imagined some shader goodness after reading the title. Like slides, burning like paper and being lifted up by wind, or simply falling down. Or a slide, that highlights a part of the current one (like a pill-button, but with some extra exposure and high-contrast of that part, while the rest alpha-fades-out and shows the background, then that highlighted part blurs+twirls+partially fades (and possibly moves out of screen) while the pill-button fades-out.
Also, start remembering transitions you've seen in games, mix them and voila you get another transition.
Is there a repo for this?
There is no repo yet, but once OpenOffice.org 2.4.0 comes out, there may be several choices. With some editions of OpenOffice.org, you may need to manually install the extension.
I'd like to see it done using Linux, and an opensource app.
The videos above were done on Fedora 7 in OpenOffice.org using Yukon and ffmpeg.
I think that this is a long way away from becoming main stream for OO.org.
Hey, I run all those cool 3D Desktops with my Linux Mint OS, but getting OO.org to do that my take a while.
Regards,
JJMacey
Phoenix, Arizona
For the torrent I posted, here are the md5sums:
0773fce720b2b91392f4770091ff7fa4 openoffice.org-core05-2.4.0-9268.i586.rpm
01336ed3d3229f5786f09e601aadb372 openoffice.org-core05u-2.4.0-9268.i586.rpm
75ca9620a2709b7ccb5dd470327b61b3 OOo-Dev_2.4.0_OOH680_m6_LinuxIntel_install_en-US.tar.bz2
Thank you very much. Md5sum is correct but the I have the following error during installation:
error: unpacking of archive failed on file /opt/openoffice.org2.4/program/libstdc++.so.6.1;47d05353: cpio: MD5 sum mismatch
Anyway, I'll try Kami's experimental build first.
Speaking about KKeyJNote... wouldn't it be possible to ad a few features from this app into this OOo extension? I'm thinking about the "Overview mode" and the "Highlight box" - as seen on http://keyjnote.sourceforge.net/
1. Install with alien or use rpm -Uvh --no-md5.
2. Install the freedesktop RPM desktop integration package using RPM or alien.
3. Fix this error: /opt/openoffice.org2.4/program/soffice.bin: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0: undefined symbol: g_once_init_enter_impl
I think it's cool, well done.
sudo apt-get install openoffice.org-ogltrans
reflects on images and somethinj like this?
Is there any schedule on the release of the extension? I can't find any information about it on any OO related site.
Thanks alot,
Jakomo
please help
i am usin amd64 with hardy herion and nvidia graphic card
thanks
my mail monomena@gmail.com
I'm also using Ubuntu 8.04.1 64-bit on my laptop with Nvidia GeForce Go 6100. I'm using the Latest Legacy GPU Version (1.0-96xx series): 96.43.07, and Compiz is running smoothly.
About a month or so back, these 3D transitions were all working fine. It was just when I used the Update Manager to update OpenOffice.org and Ubuntu that they wouldn't work. I've tried removing and reinstalling, but it didn't work. I've also done a clean reinstall of 8.04.1, and that didn't work as well. I really hope you can help me to fix it. Thanks!
Any ideas anyone?
Great work anyway! Let's hope we can make this work everywhere too!
THIS ONE SINGLE FEATURE is the major difference why MS Office PowerPoint is a superior product.
Graphics card: Nvidia GeForce Go 6100 using the Latest Legacy GPU Version (1.0-96xx series): 96.43.07
Compiz runs smoothly (with minor problems in Mandriva), and Impress doesn't crash. 3D transitions don't appear in Preview or play in Slideshow.
has anyone see how to get this resolved?
OpenOffice 3.0 is out there, and I'm trying to update my openSuSE 11.0 set-up.
Will all the cool stuff here work with 3.0?