From a long time I wanted to post something about presentations, but I felt somewhat embarassed, and thought that my project wont be an interesting argument; by the way, given that a post about zoomy-presentations in a desktop environment appears in Ubuntu Planet, given that I’ll give a talk about that at the approaching Ubuntu@Fermo event, I now feel a little more comfortable in writing something.
So, what happened… in the last months I gave some talks about Ubuntu and Free Software, and I thought a lot about presentations, about the tools we use and how they can be improved.
I’m not happy with any of the opensource slide tool I used so far. The main argument is that they all *pretend* to have a linear flow of the conversation, while my speeches are almost never linear: I like to underline some concept announced before, or announce some other things I’ll speak about a few minutes later.
Think about that: almost always we follow an index, how many times every of us have to cut and paste it in some other position of the presentation, in order to start the next argument? Well, don’t know about *you*, but *I* do, and a lot of times.
Moreover, repeating things (with care, of course 
) helps the comprehension of the listeners, and repeated concepts will be better memorized.
Also putting things in a pattern that resemble the reality helps understand and keep in memory what you said. Probably, if you’re talking about the GNOME stack you don’t absolutely want to just list the subsystems included, but you’d like to have something like a graphics and you’d like to focalize on each argument at a time.
That said: the only thing that fullfifth my wishes is prezi, but unfortunately that’s a closed/flash-based tool. Prezi is IMHO supercool, fast, and simple enough to create a presentation in few minutes (with a clear idea of what you want ).
So, I and a bunch of other Andreas took the decision to wrote something that will be opensource, cool and easy to use. Well, it’s far to be complete and to be…aehm… “visually pleasant”, but it’s still growing.
The project is here, and I don’t hide that we need developers.
The status of the project is far from complete: but you can currently take an .svg built by Inkscape or any vectorial editor, use A4 to set a path in the presentation (like the prezi-style), and use A4 as a player for that presentation. We are developing a simple editor (we don’t want to re-implement another SVG graphics editor at all), and this is in progress.
Another thing we are currently evaluating is which framework use: so, we have the default player written in gtk+librsvg+cairo, and a test branch written with the Qt Framework that use also an OpenGL renderer.
Probably, a graphical demonstrations is better than thousands of words, and (I hope that) will follow soon 
But at that time, you can try it out with the daily builds (not actually daily, we trigger them by hands )
Just install the package along with its dependencies, and try out one of the test images inside /usr/share/a4/tests/images.
We hope you enjoy it !