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Comment by jimmies | Hacker News Reader

Recently I have been contemplating getting an Apple machine at home just for Keynote, Pages, iMovie, Counter-Strike, iMessage/Facetime (and Photoshop, perhaps?), which I don't get on my low-powered Linux laptop. I've been using a Hackintosh-on-KVM kinda solution and it works OK for the most part even with my dedicated GPU, but not ideal and I'd be happy to convert to the light side to enjoy seamless upgrades and stuff.

I don't want to shell out like $1200 for a dumb macbook that I don't use, but I would be happy to shell out $500 for a Keynote machine.

For me, Keynote/Pages are the killer apps that only macOS has. iMessage/FT is the killer app that the Apple ecosystem has. Having a cheap entry to them is a great idea.

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Just my 2c, as someone who went Windows - Linux - OS X - but: completely agree on Keynote. It has the best UI of any software I’ve ever used. No kidding.

Pages is good, useable, nice, but not worth buying a Mac for.

Just today, I quickly created a slideshow by writing markdown using Marp and loved the experience. I'm guessing this will become my new workflow for making slides.

https://yhatt.github.io/marp/

I've been a LaTEX/Markdown person for years before converting to Powerpoint/Keynote.

If you want your slides to be minimal and clean and you don't have a lot of time to do, then Markdown works. To me, over time I am convinced that having the ability to do animations to explain technical ideas is great. While it's not impossible to do fly in/out/moving animations in LaTEX, presentation software makes it ten times easier to maintain.

I think that not everything is best explained in code. Sometimes you need pictures/animations to convey the ideas.

> animations to explain highly technical ideas

Do you have an example slide? Just trying to understand what you mean.

Yeah, this illustration is what can be done in PPT in 5 minutes to explain how adding more layers/data can filter noise from signal, when I don't think it will take 5 minutes for me to write a LaTEX code that does the same. That's not counting Powerpoint does allow me to draw lines and stuff easily on a canvas. If I want to do it in LaTEX, I probably will need to draw that diagram on a separate program and import it back.

https://giphy.com/gifs/4GXOwrfX1p9SuzbGzS/fullscreen

Sorry, the slide is clipped for some reason, but that's because I don't know how to configure OBS. It's not the best illustration ever, but you probably get the idea.

Here is an animation that isn't mine and I think it's really well done to explain a hard idea (not necessarily in PPT):

https://youtu.be/Tfh0ytz8S0k?t=123

I agree. I've given talks on pretty math-heavy ideas but they can still usually be explained visually in a way that is significantly easier to understand without losing fidelity. I love LaTeX and Beamer for pure text/math, but once you want animated slides, or even including videos/gifs, PDF gets flaky fast. Keynote and PPT are pretty powerful tools.

(also, the 8-bit guy is great!)

Steven Wittens have written about this and his MathBox^2. I've never used it, and from the examples it looks like it might be too much work for most presentations to be worth it, but the examples are pretty impressive.

http://acko.net/blog/mathbox2/

https://gitgud.io/unconed/mathbox

Oh, I'm already completely convinced about the expressive power of animations. Just wasn't sure how much is possible with PPT/Keynote. Could 3Blue1brown videos be made in Keynote? But I can definitely see your point. :-)

Get a second hand mac mini and maybe upgrade it with a ssd

> and maybe upgrade it with a ssd

... which can be quite an adventure if you get the latest generation & don't do this kind of stuff on a regular basis. You basically have to disassemble the whole machine!

... and it's laptop parts inside. Fun times for those of us who are used to desktop / server parts.

If you can dismantle and replace desktop and server components, a few size and configuration differences shouldn’t pose a challenge.

Not much more than an expensive LEGO project, but with significantly fewer parts and usually more available documentation!

I found it to be a challenge, which is why I made the comment. Great that you had no problem.

In retrospect, that sounded sassier than I intended, mea culpa.

ah I was thinking about the older gen ones which are more upgradeable

Maybe an iPad with a keyboard would work for you, all those Apple apps exist on it too.

They exist but they are quite limited. Even installing fonts on iOS seems like a hack, so I can't imagine doing advanced stuff such as inserting videos into a presentation being easy on it.

I would expect inserting videos to be much easier than fonts because they live in the camera roll which has one of the most used APIs.

There's Keynote on iCloud, if that satisfies your needs…

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