from Hacker News

WebSlides – Making HTML presentations easy

by RealGeek on 1/16/17, 7:52 PM with 65 comments

• by jagger27 on 1/16/17, 10:02 PM

  I have a bit of feedback: the scrolljacking doesn't work at all for me in Safari on macOS with a MacBook touchpad. All it does is activate the edge-bounce animation. Chrome is a little janky too, half activating the bounce animation and then advancing to the next slide. Firefox is fine since it doesn't do the edge-bounce.

  The worst crime (to me anyway) is the history spam and this applies to all browsers. Hitting back changes the URL but not the slide that's shown, curiously. If you're going to go this route, that's fine, just update the visible slide.

  I would prefer if it didn't make me jump 50 history items back to get to where I came from.

• by armandososa on 1/16/17, 10:53 PM

  Something to be aware: this is OP's first Github project. Let's be nice so it isn't the last.

• by jvehent on 1/16/17, 8:12 PM

  https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js/ is my framework of choice when making slides.

• by franciscop on 1/16/17, 9:02 PM

  Please make the website more usable. It has a really nice design but poor UX. At least I should be able to scroll to... scroll. And hiding elements until you hover over an invisible part of the screen is totally against a good UX (discoverability). This could be okay in games or in purely artistic webpages, but if you intend your visitors to use the page and read the content it is counterproductive.

  Edit: being this a project for making slides on a website with such a poor UX gives a really bad feeling for your potential clients. Will the project itself have the same problems? Will I be trying to hurry to finish the presentation and not find a button to save as PDF because it's invisible? etc

  Edit: the link was changed from the website to the github.com, this comment was intended for the original URL: https://webslides.tv/

• by reimertz on 1/16/17, 9:01 PM

  I created CLI for creating simplistic presentations for my first lightning talk. It turned out pretty great so I open sourced it. It has some neat features such as live-reloading server, anonymous deployment, mirrored highlighting and cursor and speaker mode. https://reimertz.github.io/lagom

  Would be awesome to get some more contributors.. hrmf, I mean, users. :)

• by ohstopitu on 1/16/17, 8:22 PM

  I generally use RemarkJS to create my slides (https://github.com/gnab/remark).

  However, what's the difference between this tool and https://slides.com/ (and it's MIT open sourced at https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js/) ?

  EDIT: not saying you should not create this tool...but what was the motivation? (or the differentiation factors?)

• by pythonaut_16 on 1/16/17, 8:36 PM

  Here's another pretty cool one using Elixir and Phoenix Channels (Websockets): https://github.com/ernie/venture

  It also has markdown based slides but syncs the presentation to clients via websockets, and allows for interactive slides with things like Polls and live chats.

• by dagenleg on 1/16/17, 9:11 PM

  Yes, but why make html presentations at all? Are there any tangible benefits except for fancy animations?

• by geraldbauer on 1/16/17, 9:34 PM

  Still early - I've put together an "Awesome Slideshows" page -> https://github.com/slideshow-s9/awesome-slideshows listing (awesome) html presentation / slideshow templates, themes, tools and more.

• by eranation on 1/17/17, 3:24 AM

  Very nice! Feature request - make this also friendly for simple websites, (just hide the next previous and add a navigation bar) Much simpler than bootstrap for non technical people, well done!

• by geraldbauer on 1/16/17, 9:26 PM

  If you want to write your talks / presentations in plain text w/ markdown formatting I put together a ready-to-fork jekyll (github pages) theme called jekyll-talks-themes -> https://github.com/henrythemes/jekyll-talks-theme (using the s6 (html) slidekit -> https://github.com/slidekit ).

• by gear54rus on 1/17/17, 6:00 AM

  On a side note, does anyone know about something like that for simple docs?

  Like if I want to migrate away for those bloated un-diffable PDFs and DOCXs to a HTML?

  Preferably it should support importing from those 2 formats.

• by geraldbauer on 1/16/17, 9:29 PM

  For for html presentations packaged for github pages (jekyll) and writing in plaint text with markdown formatting, see the slideshow-templates org -> https://github.com/slideshow-templates Ready-to-fork (use) packs include: deck.js, impress.js (3D!), reveal.js, g5, s6, s5, and more.

• by xjia on 1/17/17, 3:13 AM

  This looks really useful. Is there a way to make it directly printable? It would be great if I can use it for my lectures.

• by redleggedfrog on 1/17/17, 1:43 AM

  That's pretty slick, nice work.

  I don't make a lot of presentations, but the fact I could figure out a lot of it in minutes makes this attractive. I definitely see it as a web tool more than a marketing / management tool. If I showed our marketing dept markup they'd have a conniption fit.

• by explorigin on 1/16/17, 10:23 PM

  Pressing "B" to black the screen is a feature that I consider critical that is missing here.

• by sanjayts on 1/16/17, 11:07 PM

  I must say that I completely missed the arrow keys and the page numbers at the bottom; the font color is way too light for the background. Maybe making that a bit more prominent would go a long way.

• by navies on 1/16/17, 8:14 PM

  There's an issue where navigating to the next slide from the first slide brings you back to the first slide. I'm not sure if this is intended.

• by imafish on 1/17/17, 11:21 AM

  Project looks fine - but I don't see myself switching from latex beamer any time soon.

• by metasean on 1/17/17, 2:12 AM

  It works great on IceCatMobile and is open source - so it has my support!