Show HN: Convert your Google Slides to high-quality animated GIFs and tweet | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Convert your Google Slides to high-quality animated GIFs and tweet

talltweets.com

115 pointsamitagarwal25 comments

Cool idea! I think it's very useful for people who want to share slides but don't want to share the entire pptx file.

I wanted to make a GIF of another user's Google Slide, but with the webapp it looks like I only have access to my own slides, and only google slides. I whipped up a quick API to generate a GIF of any Google Slide URL or of any PPTX file available on the web: http://159.203.37.136/

You can use the API like this: http://159.203.37.136/?url=xyz&delay=100 which would make a GIF of the URL pptx file. For example, it could be https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/13838392jfdjkfsd/edit... or https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/torman_personal/files/samp... or any ppt or pptx url of your choosing. It works with any public google slides too.

As a sample, you can try http://159.203.37.136/?url=https://scholar.harvard.edu/files...

Here's the source code (PowerPoint compatibility will be added soon, but Google Slides works): https://github.com/Decagon/muto

Why no example on the page? Gotta seek through a 5 min video to find an example of it in action?

The animated GIF in this tweet was generated with TallTweets https://twitter.com/labnol/status/945643019490824193

Nice idea.

but i people would not want to give you permission to see their google drive files - may be add another option like, have people make their slide public and use that url to create GIF.

This Wars my exact thought as well.

Unfortunately, that's how the Google File picker works. It needs permission to read files from Google Drive even if you are looking for a specific Mime Type (Google Slides in this case)

Why not make it an add on, then?

That is likely the next step. Addon take more time for approval.

Good luck, keep up the good work!

Here are some additional resources to get you started with TallTweets.

Sample tweet with the GIF embedded: https://twitter.com/labnol/status/945643019490824193

Blog post explaining the app: https://www.labnol.org/internet/google-slides-gif/30763/

Video tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POdIuzaFVH8

This is great! I really appreciate it!

I can see this being REALLY useful for people giving presentations, to help viewers share favourite content without being distracted with snapping photos. If you agree, it might make sense to have a special link to the screen for processed slides -- then the presenter could share a bitlink to that page, and users could easily tweet out slides with their own comments :)

Example: https://talltweets.com?url=https://docs.google.com/xxxxxxxxx...

Also, is there a github issue queue where we could file tickets and feature requests? If it were available, I would be happy to transpose the tickets in these HN comments into action items for continued conversation

This is really, really nice from what I could tell from the video. I could see this being very useful!

Thank you!

So we're converting a bunch of frames to lossy gifs, then when uploading to Twitter it's being converted to an interlaced video

I really don't think this was thought out very well

Cool idea, I can see how it is useful. Doesn't have to be only for Twitter, if you get gif file, you can use of wherever (e.g. Product Hunt).

I honestly cant't understand why people insist so much on having complicated arguments over twitter, an explicitly limiting (in terms of message length) platform. Beside this, threading is awful.

Now with slides too?

I presume that might be because Twitter has established itself as the place where everyone is, not necessarily because Twitter is a particularly good platform to argue over.

Why GIF ? Why not webm ? I understand that GIF is popular and works on all platforms, but it's such a waste of resources, has bad image quality and so on.

+1 for webm

Webm is not supported out of the box for ios. Neither is WEBP (sure about webp, not sure about webm).