‘Ease Presentation editor‘ for the Gnome desktop aims to make presentation creation easy whilst providing all the standard features you’ll likely need to create slick, visually impressive presentations.

Better yet it has a very neat, animated cluttter-based interface that makes OpenOffice.Org Impress look so Windows 95 in comparison!

Features

The application really makes things simple for you. On first launch you’re presented with some template themes to choose from. You can also set the size of the presentation slides using the toolbar at the bottom.

Once in the main editor window you can double-click on headers and text fields to add text and use the menu to add images, videos, shapes and more text.

All items can be freely moved and manipulated into your chosen position, including item layer order. Videos can be set to automatically play, loop, stretch, etc.

A quick ‘off the top of my head’ feature list would look like so: –

Ships with custom themes

Add text, images, videos, shapes and animated transitions

Ability to set font type, size, colour, and alignment

Choose a solid colour, set a gradient or choose an image for slide background

All items can be ordered, manipulated, resized, etc

Slide Sorter view

Export presentation to PDF, HTML or Postscript

Slide Sorter

All slides can be freely moved around and reordered using the ‘Slide Sorter’ view.

Transitions

No Presentaion app would be complete without a basketful of neat transitory effects for use between slides. Ease has more than enough to appease even the most enthusiastic of effect-fans: from basic slides and wipes to bling-laden spins, pivots and ‘open door’ effects.

Ease currently supports many great features including: –

Download

The application is in early development so it has some rough edges. During my testing it only crashed once. I recommend hitting the save button frequently if you opt to create a presentation using it.

It’s also worth nothing that the application can only save to its own file format currently. This mean you won’t be able to play back your presentations in PowerPoint of OO.o Impress.

Ease can export presentations to PDF, HTML and Postscript.

Whilst development takes place via git there is a PPA for the curious to install from. Open a Terminal and enter: –

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:natesm/ease

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ease

Thanks to Bunny.