Samstag, 25. Mai 2013

The audience is listening - control your LibreOffice slides with the Impress Android Remote!

by Thorsten Behrens (The Document Foundation)

Saturday, 25.05.2013, Weimar 5, 15:00-16:00 Uhr

Developed mostly during GSoC 2012 by Andrzej Hunt, the Impress Android Remote ships with LibreOffice 4.0 and for the first time permits controlling, previewing, and navigating Impress presentations from your Android device. This talk is about showing you not only a nice demo of that application, but also an overview of the code involved, techniques used, and obstacles overcome. Come to see how it works, where the code is, and what else is planned in LibreOffice Impress!

The Impress Android Remote is written from scratch in Java, and communicates with LibreOffice Impress preferrably via Bluetooth, but optionally also via a Zeroconf protocol and Wifi. To that end, LibreOffice grew bluetooth support, starting with version 4.0, that we had to write some platform abstraction code for.

We use a simple, easily-extensible text-based communication protocol, that transfers slide thumbnails, current slide number and speaker notes to the Android device, and slide control information to the Impress slideshow.

Links:

About the author Thorsten Behrens:

Free software enthusiast and hacker by conviction, computer scientist by education, Thorsten has been contributing to free office suite projects since more than ten years. Thorsten is a member of the OASIS ODF technical committee and the ACM.