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OpenOffice magic

I’m working on a set of slides for tomorrow’s Sec-Info Silesia conference. I’m usually doing a small lottery on what presentation system I want to use.

Will it be S5? OpenOffice Impress? Apple KeyNote?

I like S5 and feel natural with it. But I miss GUI editor, something like Nvu with S5 editing extension (Daniel? :))

I like KeyNote. It’s extremely sleek and professional. Working on slides in KeyNote is a pure pleasure.

But since I’m an open source advocate, I always cross check if I could use Impress and keep the quality, this time I gave a try to OpenOffice 2.4 with opengl transitions.

I must say OpenOffice is getting better. I’m testing 3.0DEV on Mac and I really like it, but even in 2.4, the UI starts to present me what I need, instead of what it can do.

One of the things that are new to OpenOffice 2.4 is a set of OpenGL based transitions. It’s one of those great results of the Google Summer of Code effort.

It looks so nice, I decided to make a small screencast. I gave a try to a few of the transitions available in 2.4, and it’s of course only for the screencast (I doubt you should ever use more than 1 slide transition type in one presentation. Maybe… another for key topic changes).

(All glitches are caused by poor screencapture programs, the quality of transitions is very high when viewed on screen.)

Of course blinking transitions is just a small part of what is new. With those all features in 2.4, and 3.0, OpenOffice is growing to meet the expectations.

It’ll be my first presentation in OpenOffice in two or three years, and I’ll do my best to make sure people won’t remember it because of the transitions, but because of the content 🙂