Recently people played around a lot with a new kind of presentations. The pages in the classical presentation tool sense seem to lie around on a large canvas and while the presentation running, the focus moves over the canvas and stops by interesting points. Zooming allows to go more in detail and other cool graphics effects make it fun to watch these presentations.

This week was the fifth Hackweek at Novell where we can pick an interesting topic and work on it. I am always interested in cool applications and I wanted to investigate a bit on Qts GraphicsView anyway so I decided to go for a proof of concept implementation of a lightweight but cool presentation tool following these concepts.

The tool is called Zippl (for no specific reason). It is implemented in C++ with Qt 4.6. Via a XML file the user can specify so called spots on the Zippl-canvas. During a presentation one after the other canvas is displayed with an animated move from one to the other.

Spots can consist of text in various fonts and sizes, geometric forms and images. Colors and line widths and stuff can be specified for each item. It is amazing what can already be done with these few elements.

But decide yourself by checking the following out, its the first little presentation done with Zippl:

With Qt its again fun to work on this kind of applications and the GraphicsView framework is awesome. If you want to see code, it is in the KDE svn, module playground/office.

What do you think? Is that something to investigate more on? You can give me feedback in openFATE about it if you want and rate it.