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

decksetapp.com

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

#5

Post by stdbrouw »

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.

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

#6

Post by chriseidhof »

milani wrote: post #3
chriseidhof wrote: post #2

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...

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

#7

Post by chriseidhof »

stdbrouw wrote: post #5

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 n…

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.

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

#8

Post by erikb »

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.

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

#9

Post by chriseidhof »

erikb wrote: post #8

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.
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