Show HN: We created a Mac app that creates presentations from Markdown | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We created a Mac app that creates presentations from Markdown

decksetapp.com

35 pointschriseidhof29 comments

I have a lot of hesitation about plopping down $20 without being able to try it first (which is why I generally dislike buying apps on Mac App Store). Too many unanswered questions. How does it handle text overflow? Is this going to go away it two months? Are new features coming (maybe export to PPT)?

I'm going to give it a try anyway, since it would be pretty damn useful to be able to whip up a presentation in a text file. I really hate arranging things in Keynote/Powerpoint. It takes forever. It's definitely struck a chord with me - so if I buy this, I hope that it gains more functionality.

If you do, please let us know what it turns out.

I did. Not wholly impressed. Needs way more options regarding the presentation.

This seems to be quite nice. The generated slides look very good.

For everyone looking for a html based alternative: slideshow (or S9) [1] is a ruby tool that also lets you generate slides from markdown. It has output plugins for most of the popular html5/js-based presentation systems.

It is a nice tool but what I like even better is its mailing list [2]. It is a wonderful place to learn about and discuss alternative and/or related projects.

[1] http://slideshow-s9.github.io/ [2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/webslideshow

There's also http://hast.me.

The same thing exists for the R programming language in Slidify [0]. I found Slidify + Google's io2012 framework an efficient way to generate good-looking presentations [1] so I can see the appeal in extending this to non-programmers.

[0] http://slidify.org/

[1] http://benjaminlmoore.wordpress.com/2014/02/24/slidify-prese... — disclaimer: my blog

Reveal.js (https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js) also supports writing your slides in Markdown.

I've used it for the last 3 or 4 presentations I've given and it has worked out well. It doesn't come with a huge variety of themes, but it is easy to share - I can just push it out to Github Pages.

Reveal.js is practically the default presentation tool for some groups at my workplace. Works quite well and looks quite good as well. Publishing is easy and works on FF and Chrome.

Love it. I've been making my presentations in InDesign for a while now, and exporting to PDF, and while the end result always looks great, I end up spending an inordinate amount of time choosing the typeface and the look and feel. Turning a Markdown document into a presentation by simply selecting a theme and a color scheme sounds wonderful to me, especially considering the themes are high quality.

One thing that's not entirely clear, though, is how the automatic layout works. For example, does it colorize photos to match the color scheme? What if you don't want it to? How does it resize photos when it needs to? Is text size based on the amount of text in a slide? Is it fully automatic or can some things be tweaked manually? I'm guessing this stuff has been thought through pretty well, but OTOH "it automatically makes things look pretty" does sound a little bit too good to be true.

It does colorize photos according to the color scheme, however, you can also turn this off: http://www.decksetapp.com/support/#how-can-i-prevent-deckset...

Yes, images are resized, depending on what you want: http://www.decksetapp.com/support/#whats-the-best-way-to-wor...

The text does not resize. You can make headers 'fit', which means they fill up the available space. The only thing that automatically scales down the font when needed is source code =). Being Objective-C developers, we really needed this, haha.

Looks interesting. I certainly wouldn't buy before trying though. I'd strongly suggest a crippled version that lets people platy with it - disable saving, or watermark or ... you get the idea.

This is very impressive.

One speculative question (because the Markdown would be mind-bogging for most of your users, but) do you plan on including animations?

I know those have got a bad rap after your lame colleagues at a company too big to be cool made whizz-bang into a series of horrible failed effects, but… well done, animations can help to explain complex things, a lot. There was a link to dozen of great examples yesterday on HN.

We had a prototype, but it might take a while to do this right. So: maybe... but first, there's a lot of other things to do...

Somewhat relevant: http://remarkjs.com/

Saw this and instantly thought presentations from a gist might be cool. Looks like someone already has an implimentation: https://github.com/nzoschke/gistdeck

This looks absolutely great. I, however, would like to chime in for a downloadable test version, just to see the workflow of how to actually build a presentation.

And of course, I'm very happy to answer any questions!

Is it based on html5? if yes, what container did you use?

No, it's not, it's all native Cocoa text rendering. We deeply cared about the design and wanted full control, and being able to lay out glyhps individually is very important...

I won't pay $20 without trying it first, otherwise it's like throwing money out of the window… Is there any plan for a downloadable trial version?

or they could offer a 24 hour or 7-day full refund?

Unfortunately we cannot offer something like this through the App Store. However, you can request a refund via Apple for a purchase in the App Store. It's a bit of a hassle though...

No. But you couldput a demo/crippled version on your Web site for people to evaluate.

We're definitely thinking about it.

i'm ok with giving you a cookie

There are so many ways to create an App without making it Mac dependent. Why did you choose that way? It's something I'm looking for but I'm like 99% on Ubuntu and 1% on Windows nowadays.

*edit: From what I can see from the start page it's awesome! Would instantly buy an Ubuntuable version! 20 Bucks seems to be a good price.

We are Mac developers, and we wanted to make use of all the great stuff that Mac provides us in terms of text layout... But we are thinking of what we could do to bring this to other platforms as well.

Thanks! I subscribed to the landing page.

It's not exactly the same, but UberWriter (disclaimer: I made it) is capable of Markdown -> Slideshow export, too.

More specifically, it's a functionality provided by pandoc.

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