Pointy is a Qt 5/Qt Quick 2 presentation program, similar to Pinpoint[1]. It reads in a simple plain text file, which contains a markdown-type syntax, and generates a presentation. A notes screen, which displays comments from the text file, and an overview grid window is also generated.
A demo screencast is available on Youtube: http://youtu.be/e9eizBmsZ3w
The program is capable of displaying video, images and animated gif files. Commands may also be embedded in a slide, so that a terminal or another program may be launched without leaving the presentation.
The graphical interface is implemented in QML on top of Qt/C++, using test driven development (TDD) with QtTest.
Note: Pointy is still not considered released.
Pointy uses the Qt Quick 2 framework, which is part of Qt 5. You will need to install Qt 5. Happily, the Qt Project make installation binaries available (from http://qt-project.org/downloads), so no long compilation step is necessary (unless you like that sort of thing, and why not?). OpenGL development library installation may also be required.
A move from QMake to CMake is being considered. The current recommendation for building Pointy is through Qt Creator (included in the Qt 5 installation). Do not run make install.
Pointy uses Pinpoint syntax:
# this is a comment
# general settings are specified in a header, as follows:
[fill] # image fills the slide
[lightsteelblue] # fill slides with this colour
-- # A new slide
Slide text.
-- [background_image.png]
This slide will have an image in the background, provided the
named image file is in the executable's path.
-- [video_file.ogv]
A video placeholder will appear in the slide, and the video will
play once Return is pressed.
-- [command=gvim pin_file.pin]
See pin_file.pin for more examples
Implement an option to output the presentation as a pdf.
In non-fullscreen mode, flickering was observed during slide fade transitions on KDE using nVidia and Nouveau graphics drivers. This distortion did not occur if desktop effects were switched off (the default shortcut to do this on KDE is Alt-Shift-F12). Pointy exhibited flicker on Gnome-Shell (Fedora 18) with the Nouveau driver, but not with the nVidia driver. No such distortion has been observed, so far, with Intel graphics chips.
[1] Pinpoint, the program that inspired Pointy, is available from
https://live.gnome.org/Pinpoint
and was developed by the following authors:
Øyvind Kolås, Damien Lespiau, Emmanuele Bassi, Neil Roberts, Nick Richards, daniel g. siegel, Jussi Kukkonen, Chris Lord, Will Thompson, Andoni Morales Alastruey, Vladimír Kincl, Antonio Terceiro, Gary Ching-Pang Lin, Lionel Landwerlin, and Christoph Fischer