Finally back home to the internets.

• Connected the scale bar to the slides, works exactly the same as it does for the work area
• Added a tip about slide shows to the tip panel
• fixed an annoying issue where when saving a slideshow, the dropdown menu would refresh and possible select a different slideshow
• Tested all layout managers with slide shows and they seem to all be working
• Played a great deal with transitions and found some cool open source ones available but integrating them would be a great deal of work and probably not worth it right now.  For now three basic transitions are available and look pretty good:
  • Dissolve (like fade but also fades text)
  • Wipe
  • Zoom (looks pretty cool actually)

Will start looking at the network widget.