Show HN: PowerPoint slide builder with handwriting | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: PowerPoint slide builder with handwriting

webdemo.myscript.com

163 pointspierrealban37 comments

For curious peoples, the internals of this demo are explained in this blog post: https://medium.com/@myscriptdeveloper/using-vue-js-to-handwr... It uses behind the hood MyScriptJS and MyScript iink SDK cloud

Interesting but a small annoyance is the evil destruction of history/back button functionality - totally unnecessary and is either manipulative or inept.

I accidentally clicked this link, got trapped, and came back here just to say the same thing. Any page that acts like this is simply dead to me.

What browser are you using? in safari the back button worked fine for me.

Using this on Safari on iOS:

Every time I tried to swipe Back I would briefly see the HN page, and then it would reload the demo page. It wouldn’t let me swipe Back to HN.

Aaaand my interest in this is gone.

Thanks for spotting that. Will try to fix.

The back button worked just fine for me on Chrome.

Not on Chrome Android

Back button hijacking = not even going to consider this.

Cool! Something similar can be produced, like the slides Martin Kleppmann uses in his presentations e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2RJQELoM6Y

I didn't know if he was drawing them, or using a framework to create them. Anyone know what he uses ?

I'd guess felt-tip pen and watercolour. Not a particularly exciting framework, to be fair, but works really well.

Isn't that just using something like an apple pencil to write directly on slides on an ipad? I didn't notice anything special. But maybe I missed something.

He's probably using paper app on iPad.

You should partner with Moleskine. They already have a platform for taking notes in handwriting form and digitizes them, but taking them directly from Moleskine to Ppt. I would buy that in an instant!

I'm very impressed...

I added a new slide to the demo. Then I tried my best to legibly write "TEST SLIDE" with a simple smiling face underneath. When I clicked preview, my poorly drawn words and face had been transformed into real text and an emoji.

Fantastic work.

Google should integrate this in Drive. It's just too easy to make diagrams this way.

This is absolute witchcraft. SOooo amazing - keep up the great work!

This is interesting/amusing, but the math version is remarkable. I like the scribble erase.

Looks great! I recently tried to make something similar where one could simultaneously sketch on a tablet and on a laptop - https://onthesamepage.online/about

works great on iphone too. I added it to my homescreen, but the experience is not great, it behaves just like a bookmark. I was thinking it would work like a PWA. Just launch, scribble notes, close. Launch again to restart or start new sketch. Ink is really good.

Yes, I actually plan to make it a pwa and now am in progress - offline sync is a bit problematic (I wish all browsers supported PWA), but I'm getting closer.

Wow, this is the first time I actually want to get a pad!

If not in your plans: - Could use a text input, otherwise pretty hard on desktop. - In the current and past companies we'd use draw.io. Not sure if it's possible how difficult it would be to export it.

Would pay.

Disclaimer: I work at Lucid

Lucidchart is a much better and feature rich platform than draw.io and allows for creating slides and exporting them to Google slides.

You'll have to pay for the more advanced features like export to Google slides though

Just suggestion: since most people (esp at work) use traditional setup (keyboard+mouse), I think it'd be better if people can type for text instead of drawing.

This is a demo for their stroke to text converter. It took me a while to figure that out. I was hoping to run it local to my iPad, so I could create slides on my long plane rides. But they are also hitting their server to do the conversion, so it looks like I would need Internet access (and I wasn't able to make it work with ppt on my ipad anyway.) But it is a good demo.

I don't want to be that shameless, but https://onthesamepage.online does just that. I use it for sketching diagrams and mind maps daily. Not for presentations, but can export to PNG and SVG. Also kind of collaborative (I often use it alone, but from both tablet and laptop at the same time).

The handwriting recognition is very good. The "diagram block" recognition not so.

Both are much better than I would've expected to be fair, but yeah the block recognition is still slightly short of usable.

The handwriting recognition is amazing.

Aw man, I don't have a mouse or trackball with me today. The trackpad sucks for drawing.

I wish there was something I could do in freehand drawing interfaces that assumed mouse-button-down and let me just drag.

Perhaps a keyboard shortcut to replace mouse-button-down, that definitely sounds do-able.

LeftAlt + LeftShift + Numlock? Then 0 to hold mouse button and . to release.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_keys

Much needed. I usually draw them into a tablet, export them as images and then put them into slides. This is much neater.

I couldn't test it in a tablet right now. How does it do when hand-drawing in a tablet?

Thanks!

Just tried on my iPad. Preview works in both Chrome and Firefox, but neither save (I do have PowerPoint loaded on the iPad and I use it there occasionally.) On Firefox when I save I get an "error" dialog, and the chance to choose someplace to save it to - but Powerpoint is not one of the options. In Chrome when I save a new browser tab opens with a lot of data - I'm assuming that it is what would have been written as a ppt file.

How different is this from the Nebo technology?

Sounded great but in practice was too fiddly.

Why not allow scanned documents to be OCR'ed to diagram + text. Thats the killer app!!!

This would be a great acquisition for Apple for Apple Notes!

Probably it will. Soon.

love it

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