Google Slides Is Hilarious | Hacker News Reader

Google Slides Is Hilarious

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30 pointsmy12parsecs17 comments

I don't know what the author has against inches. Other than being US focused it seems like as reasonable unit as any. I think it makes more sense to use an absolute every-day unit than pixels. Plus for pixels the question is who's pixels? Should the size of things change if someone opens it with a high DPI display?

Also I suspect embedding maps or looking stuff up when making a presentation is pretty common. I don't like the sidebar approach to it (sidebar should be a browser feature if anything) but I think it does make product sense.

The other points seem spot-on though. Although a few are a little nitpicky about getting perfect styling and alignment that the average user isn't too concerned about.

> List indentations look moronic when you resize text

Oh, this one bites me in Google Docs. I always wondering why the intents look awful by default.

>Other than being US focused it seems like as reasonable unit as any.

...Majority of the world uses metric. People actually do print slides and may want to design it for both printing (where the paper is metric) and display.

> Other than being US focused

Well, that's the crux of the problem though. The majority of the world can't just dismiss it like that.

But this doesn't fall under "Hilarious". Sure, ideally the default unit should match locale. But not doing that doesn't seem like they are trolling to me. They are just lazy. The decision isn't dumb, they just targeted their primary audience (even if it is a minority) and moved on.

And the authors suggestion of pixel seems worse, even to me living in a metric-first country. I would take inches over px as a default (but give me mm please).

But it is hilarious. The constant, unrelenting navel-gazing is very, very funny.

How many inches are in a slide? How many pixels? They're probably picking a standard slide size and using inches relative to that, which I guess makes sense, but I think I'd prefer unitless at that point.

Did some research. Apparently Microsoft and Apple both uses inches in their presentation software. However, I've found 3 or 4 different answers for what a "standard slide size" is.

So apparently there's precedence for Google's choices, even if I'm lost as to the reasoning.

Edit: Hmm, I actually bet it has something to do with font sizing.

Yeah, but if you are saying "a slide is 1080px tall" then you may as well use a real unit, since pixels are basically a synthetic unit at this point. A real unit does help you when printing with no real downside.

Only if it's standardized somehow! 1, 2, or 4 slides per page? What margins? Letter or A4?

If we're doing inch to inch conversions, we may as well just go unitless!

For printed documents I prefer inches since letter paper is 8.5" x 11" and there are common chars/inch, lines/inch, and of course 72 points/inch. With Google Slides though I only use on screens and always just go by the ticks whatever they may be.

You’ve got me curious - who has ever embedded a map in a presentation and why?

It seems absolutely useless to me, but I’d love to learn why it isn’t!

Worst thing about Google docs is the copy/paste story, especially when you compare to MS Office and all the clipboard format converters.

First, images and figures only flow one way, into Google docs. You cannot get them back out. You cannot even reliably copy them from one doc/slide/etc to another. You cannot export them to SVG or PNG or whatever, as appropriate, and re-embed them. It's just a dead end.

This is a general problem, but a big one. Web apps typically try very hard to lock-in, and have terrible interoperability.

You'd think that Google's apps would at least interoperate with one another, but they don't.

The Windows clipboard was so underrated. OLE too.

Speaking of shitty Web app office suites... I had to use Sharepoint/word the other day. What an absolutely buggy mess that was. Bits of the document would randomly break while someone else was editing elsewhere, every table I inserted was in a supposition of "ok", "messed up", and "completely broken" until I closed the document and returned the next day. Random hot keys would just not work or perform nonsensical unrelated actions. The list goes on...

I tried LibreOffice Impress the other day. It wasn't exactly pleasant either.

Maybe I should give Adelie a try

[0] https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/adelie.html

This is quite funny but you do get used to it.

You don't even calculate the hours per year you spent removing padding from text boxes anymore...

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