The strangest part about this disaster is that all of these problems should have been immediately noticed by anyone at Figma actually using the software.
A lot of comments are blaming the cloud or cross-platform apps but similar functionality works fine in Figma’s non-slides app. They’ve solved these problems years ago.
So why is Slides such a disaster? From the outside, this feels like what some startups do when they hear influencers exaggerate advice about shipping your MVP as fast as possible and everyone rushes to get something launched, no matter how buggy. They forget that real users don’t like being burned by a product that fails when they need it and it’s hard to recover from that.
If I project from my own career experience, this is also similar to all the times I’ve been stuck under ladder-climbing executives who thought they could mandate reality and have all the features delivered all at once on an arbitrary deadline they came up with before consulting the engineers. They end up shipping something to avoid the wrath of an executive who demands specific deadlines, then they hope to finish the features and clean up the bugs in production. In my case, the executive in question didn’t actually use the software, so this was the rational way forward within the company if you wanted to look good. And of course, it led to results just like this
What happened to Allen here sucks. I've messaged the team so we can dig into this specific case. More generally, we know that Slides needs to be bulletproof when presenting, and nothing less than that is acceptable.
As an FYI, we _do_ use Figma Slides internally for pretty much everything, from internal meetings to major events. As a PM I use it every week, and our internal feedback channel for Slides is super active with folks like me requesting improvements. Figma is also a pretty unique place, where it's more likely our senior leadership request quality improvements than chase for deadlines - we know how critical the user experience is. We don't always get it right, but when we don't we're committed to fixing it.
When I make Apple style presentations (no visual noise, no bullet point lists, one appealing visual / idea on one slide etc and narrating the story instead of showing densely packed info in one slide after another), I can literally see how my audience is really enjoying the presentation, getting the idea, but then constantly management approaches me telling me to use the corporate template, stick to the template, use the template elements, etc.
They just don’t get it. What comprises a good presentation. Even if they themselves enjoy the content while they are in the audience.
Futile.
Edit: Tangential: I am the only one using a MacBook in a company of 700+ coworkers.
In my experience, people also use slides as a document rather than an aide. In all my presentations I prefer to use slides as a companion to my planned speech. Then afterwards I'm completely surprised when people ask for my slides. I send them gladly but they're completely useless on their own.
So I have also experienced my managed pushing me to put all the information on the slide so that you can just read the slides and understand all the ideas, and the presenter is reduced to a voice over.
I've struck a tentative balance with the main one line messages being the slide titles, with other slide content buttressing the main point.
I can tell the audience to ignore the content and focus on the title for certain slides; or just repeat the slide title before and after for emphasis, etc... while also having access to all kinds of supporting evidence (as is often necessary for technical talks).
PS: Beware that stripped-down / minimalist presentations are suitable for the specific kind of communication / impressionism that Apple marketing is known for. But that's almost exactly the opposite of what is necessary in other situations. So that style is far from universally applicable; mustn't elevate form over function.
* Ideally, a table of contents should be understandable by itself. In particular, it should be comprehensible before someone has heard your talk.
* A frame with too little on it is better than a frame with too much on it. A usual frame should have between 20 and 40 words. The maximum should be at about 80 words
* Do not assume that everyone in the audience is an expert on the subject matter. Even if the people listening to you should be experts, they may last have heard about things you consider obvious several years ago. You should always have the time for a quick reminder of what exactly a “semantical complexity class” or an “ω-complete partial ordering” is.
* Keep it simple. Typically, your audience will see a slide for less than 50 seconds. They will not have the time to puzzle through long sentences or complicated formulas
* Do not use more than two levels of “subitemizing.” beamer supports three levels, but you should not use that third level. Mostly, you should not even use the second one. Use good graphics instead.
* Never use footnotes. They needlessly disrupt the flow of reading. Either what is said in the footnote is important and should be put in the normal text; or it is not important and should be omitted (especially in a presentation).
* Use short sentences.
* Put (at least) one graphic on each slide, whenever possible. Visualizations help an audience enormously
* Like text, you should explain everything that is shown on a graphic. Unexplained details make the audience puzzle whether this was something important that they have missed. Be careful when importing graphics from a paper or some other source. They usually have much more detail than you will be able to explain and should be radically simplified
* Do not use animations just to attract the attention of your audience. This often distracts attention away from the main topic of the slide. No matter how cute a rotating, flying theorem seems to look and no matter how badly you feel your audience needs some action to keep it happy, most people in the audience will typically feel you are making fun of them
As others have noted, this comes from people expecting the slides to work as a document without the presenter. This is a bad idea (other document formats are better for that). But you can satisfy that desire in one of two ways:
1) Add lots of speaker notes, containing all the detail you presented, so that the combination of the presentation and speaker notes gives the self-contained information.
2) Write a separate self-contained document that contains all the information of the presentation, with slides containing a few words becoming section headings, and slides containing a useful image or chart becoming figures with captions. That'll be more useful than a corporate-style presentation deck would have been, but contain all the necessary information. Add a note to the top saying "This document contains all the information previously given in an X minute presentation. NAME is available to re-present this material on request."
there is a great difference between corporate presentations vs sales presentation
People on WWDC are there because they wanted to.
Most corporate presentations are not like that. Yes, I am sure HR is very excited about that new expense reimbursement process. And the UX team is super happy about website redesign. And the team members sitting on the front rows are really enjoying hearing about their work.
But most people who watch those don't really care. They only go to presentations because the other channels are insufficient - the team could not be figured out how to create concise docs that still have all the important details, so now everyone has suffer through another long presentation instead...
In this case, you don't want "one visual per slide", you want to have informative slides so someone who is watching your presentation while eating lunch, or on 2x speed, does not get lost. Ideally, slides would be self-standing and presenter would only be needed for those who don't want to read.
Listen to your management. They get it, you don't.
There are several different types of slides, and understanding it's purpose is the key success and agreement. At the very least I coach my team to think are these presentation slides (fee bullets, some visuals, focus on the speaker), vs are they or will they become reference slides, which will be read by people not at your presentation or some time later. And there's my all time (/s) favourite, project management by slides.
I found it (eventually....) futile to rage against corporate culture of misuse of slides for purposes other than presentation. That's likely where your disconnect lies though. Hope you have better luck than I did long term!
Slides have unfortunately moved well beyond their intended use. People (management) often asks for more and more information density, but that's not the point of slides. What they really want is a report or memo. Slides were meant to convey information during presentation and don't hold up well absent that context. I hate slides as a medium outside of the specific text of a conversation - they're a bad pre-read, and they're a poor meeting summary. It's unfortunate that slides have become _the_ corporate communication medium.
Steve Jobs passed away in 2011. 14 Years. His Presentation was legendary. iPhone was introduced in 2007. 18 years.
The world should have learned what a great presentation is and what presentation software should be like. And yet nearly 20 years later No Slides or presentation software, including MS Powerpoint is even at the level of Keynote in 2007.
If there is one thing I learned, is that even if you ask people to copy, making a 100% exact replica in itself is hard enough. Most people cant even copy exact and they ignore the small details. They copy and make things worse much like Microsoft in the 90s and 00s.
And this at the end may come down to taste. Just like Stave Jobs said, the biggest problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste. They do not have the craftsmanship or the product genius to make a call on what is a great product or a bad product. Instead a great product is distilled into one that sell or not, by the sales and marketing people, which is the current Apple.
Even that once failed me. I was to give a presentation about a paper I did at my university and I had used some fonts in it that I rather liked. The problem was that the computer didn't like them (and they weren't actually embedded within the PDF), which lead to all of the text in the presentation being cut off and more or less ruined it.
Now it's PDF/A or nothing, thankfully even LibreOffice Impress lets me export those files under File > Export as > Export as PDF > General > Archival (PDF/A, ISO 19005): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A#Description
No animations or other dynamic content, but for those I can just link to YouTube or show a local MP4 file or whatever. It's simple and hasn't failed me since. Oh also, if a computer at a given place has a web browser, then it's possible to open those files. No other software needed, no logins to web platforms that must be up, nothing.
I like how iA Presenter (no affiliation) is based around markdown and telling a story first. The layout is automatic and predictable. Last time I used it, there was no way you have a bullet point list at all. It is limited, but in a good way. And yes, it works offline.
I tried out reveal.js (and then slides.com) for a time. But it felt pretty limiting. And then the company I was with pretty much adopted Google Slides and, especially at the time, I was doing a lot of co-presenting and the collaboration features were really useful.
Replying to add Deckset (https://www.deckset.com/) as a (non-FOSS) option. Deckset and other content-based approaches with automatic layout always seemed like a good way to orient slides around the content instead of futzing with slide transitions for hours.
Seems like great software, but the website is unfortunately obnoxious. I feel like the overlap between people who would like to create slides in Markdown, and those who would prefer this website over a much simpler alternative, is rather small.
I love iAPresenter. It definitely has lists and bullets if you want them. I (mis)use it to create proposal PDFs to send to clients. Even though it’s primarily aimed as presentations, it’s a great way to put together quick documents too.
The lesson I take from this is to just use software that is running locally on the machine, especially when doing presentations. Maybe even have a backup that is a simple PDF that you can show page by page - no animations though but can still show stages of the animation.
This has been my approach to presentations. If it was originally a google slides document, I download it locally before the presentation time, and even for local .pptx/.odp files I always make sure to export an extra copy in PDF format, just in case.
Sometimes, for especially important talks, I even bring two laptops pre-provisioned with the slides just in case one has technical issues for some reason or another.
Its not that much extra work, and should the preparations pay off even once makes every bit of the toil well worth it. Nothing worse than embarrassing yourself in a room full of your colleagues, even moreso if the talk will be recorded and posted online for others to witness in perpetuity.
I use Google Slides but I always create a local PDF. I actually find Google Slides has mostly everything I need and not a lot of the chrome that I don't. (Feel the same about Google Docs.) I don't use builds or animations anyway 99% of the time.
Keynote is hands down the best designed piece of software I’ve ever used. Who the hell crafted that level of care into the UX of a presentation app I do not know but it is absolutely next level. It is almost _perfect_. I use Keynote all the time and there are exactly two flaws I’ve noticed, which is insane.
(One is a bug when clicking the colour palette sometimes deselects the selected object: the other is that you can’t start with a rectangle and change it to a rounded rectangle)
If anyone from the Keynote team reads this, I just want to say - you are absolute heroes.
> I also try to avoid cloud first. If servers are slow or down or you're locked out for whatever reason, you won't have access to your own files.
I still use Sketch instead of Figma for projects that are solo and where collaboration doesn’t require that the other participants have edit capabilities for this reason (among others).
Not only is it weird that with Figma you don’t get to keep a local file if you don’t constantly export to keep your local copy up to date, it means that your full fidelity work is locked up in a proprietary format that’s subject to sudden change at the company’s whims, breaking any tools reverse engineered for the purpose of liberating users’ work.
By contrast, while Sketch has a cloud mode it can also be local-first and its maker publishes an open spec for its file format. That’s the right way to do things.
As an attendee my personal pet peeve is that an increasing number of my fellow speakers at conferences are now using AI-generated slide decks, which are inevitably full of
- unneeded AI visuals
and
- huge walls of AI prose that are completely impossible to read at a distance
I do not understand why those slide-generator startups overdo it so much, when it seems the "one visual per slide" paradigm is both a much better experience for the audience, and would also be so much easier to generate.
I think the founders of these startups and the users who use their products just don’t care about or notice details. They press a button, see some slides that look nice at a glance, and ship it. They’re vibe working.
Tangential but I find modern presentation software bizarrely “broken”. It’s like the xerox (PARC?) “everything is paper” analogy is the only way to do things.
Presentations seem to be a way of getting whatever text and photos you want to put, and hope the reader can read between the lines and get value out of it. Just look at powerpoint’s smart art examples for starters… and compare them with any professional published report by any large agency.
A medium which allows animations should not be behind a static PDF, yet if you want to make your ppt that polished you need to spend an inordinate amount of time as ppt doesn’t support any of the nicer stuff natively.
I haven’t used miro’s extension for powerpoint but I suspect whatever it allows would be far superior to what Microsoft allows natively.
I think there is opportunity for a more design-oriented tool in this space. I tried pitch.com a while back and was a heavy Google Slides user for a while, but, like the author, I keep coming back to Keynote.
What drives me nuts, however, is the lacking vector workflow in Keynote. The only way to export vector graphics is by exporting as a PDF. Import is similarly difficult. I wonder how this is done internally at Apple, but I would assume that everything we see these days in the keynotes is done using Motion anyways.
To this day I still don't get folks that instead of using Keynote, PowerPoint, Slides, Impress, do this to themselves using SaaS software created for UI/UX, or whiteboard collaboration.
At least reveal.js is understandable due to its programming focus and automating slide generation with multiple output formats.
Presentations were a solved problem 40 years ago with Hypercard. Regardless of what you use today (PPT, Keynote, LibreOffice Impress), they all do the exact same thing.
Figma is following the Dropbox blueprint of building vendor lock-in (who is using Dropbox Paper??), and part of that involves creating senseless roadblocks (can save to local file, can't present locally!) to keep users inside their "ecosystem".
I shall continue to scream it to the clouds: we perfected office software sometime around 2001, and everything since then has either been a sidestep to remain compatible with modern infrastructure, or a step backwards.
I think the problem here is less about Figma Slides and more about the pervasive belief that things should be online-first, when reality is by definition offline-first.
That's why I'm building a slideshow editor that is fast, cross-platform, offline-first but also viewable online. I can't wait to share it with HN....soon
Will we always labor under this "it must be a web app" burden? I've written "GUI" software in css/html/javascript, Jetpack Compose, UIKit, Smalltalk, XWindows, WPF, MFC. The web has got to be the worst of all of them when it comes to building UIs that aren't full of weird edge cases and jankiness. It's a frankenstein of committee momentum. You can do some fun/cool things with it, but it's just oh so
I know that may be an unpopular position (a younger developer recently told me so), because LOTS of people have invested heavily in skills to try and make this work, but I just don't see it. The single appeal a web app has its potential for cross platform deployment. It has not been my experience that having to write apps in 3 different computer language styles spread across at least two maybe connected CPUs will end up a better overall end user experience than a purpose built single platform executable that leverages the user's host operating system. YMMV
Tried Figma Slides when it came out. It was an unfinished product that was missing core functionality.
Figma's new Website Builder is even much worse.
I wouldn't put my trust into anything Figma is doing these days. It's still a great app for visual design, but with the current trajectory that might also change soon. Ever since the Adobe incident my trust in them has been greatly reduced.
Funny enough, you can export a Keynote presentation in HTML and it will work as a local website, with anchor links and everything. The only thing that didn't work when I tried it were animations in Firefox. Chrome and Safari handled them fine.
Figma has been for a while now designed and built for its investors rather than users. The biggest crime is Figma itself (Figma “design”) which is being redesigned over time to not improve but make it even worse with design decisions that are antithesis of good UIUX practice. And new generations of designers who haven’t seen much else, now take Figma’s design decisions as norm and use that in their work.
Nobody asked for figjam and slides, those are created to build growth for investors. Effort spent on those products should have been spent on fixing Figma “design” product.
They employ hundreds in customer support. Figma forums is a customer defusal machine giving a sense of attention with “thank you for the feedback” and nothing ever gets fixed.
What can you expect from a product that was a result of arbitrary choice by a guy who needed a use case for their real-time JS communication library.
[+] [-] Aurornis|10 months ago|reply
A lot of comments are blaming the cloud or cross-platform apps but similar functionality works fine in Figma’s non-slides app. They’ve solved these problems years ago.
So why is Slides such a disaster? From the outside, this feels like what some startups do when they hear influencers exaggerate advice about shipping your MVP as fast as possible and everyone rushes to get something launched, no matter how buggy. They forget that real users don’t like being burned by a product that fails when they need it and it’s hard to recover from that.
If I project from my own career experience, this is also similar to all the times I’ve been stuck under ladder-climbing executives who thought they could mandate reality and have all the features delivered all at once on an arbitrary deadline they came up with before consulting the engineers. They end up shipping something to avoid the wrath of an executive who demands specific deadlines, then they hope to finish the features and clean up the bugs in production. In my case, the executive in question didn’t actually use the software, so this was the rational way forward within the company if you wanted to look good. And of course, it led to results just like this
[+] [-] greysteil|10 months ago|reply
What happened to Allen here sucks. I've messaged the team so we can dig into this specific case. More generally, we know that Slides needs to be bulletproof when presenting, and nothing less than that is acceptable.
As an FYI, we _do_ use Figma Slides internally for pretty much everything, from internal meetings to major events. As a PM I use it every week, and our internal feedback channel for Slides is super active with folks like me requesting improvements. Figma is also a pretty unique place, where it's more likely our senior leadership request quality improvements than chase for deadlines - we know how critical the user experience is. We don't always get it right, but when we don't we're committed to fixing it.
[+] [-] unknown|10 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] xk_id|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] submeta|10 months ago|reply
They just don’t get it. What comprises a good presentation. Even if they themselves enjoy the content while they are in the audience.
Futile.
Edit: Tangential: I am the only one using a MacBook in a company of 700+ coworkers.
[+] [-] seventhtiger|10 months ago|reply
So I have also experienced my managed pushing me to put all the information on the slide so that you can just read the slides and understand all the ideas, and the presenter is reduced to a voice over.
[+] [-] ssivark|10 months ago|reply
I can tell the audience to ignore the content and focus on the title for certain slides; or just repeat the slide title before and after for emphasis, etc... while also having access to all kinds of supporting evidence (as is often necessary for technical talks).
PS: Beware that stripped-down / minimalist presentations are suitable for the specific kind of communication / impressionism that Apple marketing is known for. But that's almost exactly the opposite of what is necessary in other situations. So that style is far from universally applicable; mustn't elevate form over function.
[+] [-] arkh|10 months ago|reply
Some excerpts:
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|10 months ago|reply
1) Add lots of speaker notes, containing all the detail you presented, so that the combination of the presentation and speaker notes gives the self-contained information.
2) Write a separate self-contained document that contains all the information of the presentation, with slides containing a few words becoming section headings, and slides containing a useful image or chart becoming figures with captions. That'll be more useful than a corporate-style presentation deck would have been, but contain all the necessary information. Add a note to the top saying "This document contains all the information previously given in an X minute presentation. NAME is available to re-present this material on request."
[+] [-] illwrks|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] theamk|10 months ago|reply
People on WWDC are there because they wanted to.
Most corporate presentations are not like that. Yes, I am sure HR is very excited about that new expense reimbursement process. And the UX team is super happy about website redesign. And the team members sitting on the front rows are really enjoying hearing about their work.
But most people who watch those don't really care. They only go to presentations because the other channels are insufficient - the team could not be figured out how to create concise docs that still have all the important details, so now everyone has suffer through another long presentation instead...
In this case, you don't want "one visual per slide", you want to have informative slides so someone who is watching your presentation while eating lunch, or on 2x speed, does not get lost. Ideally, slides would be self-standing and presenter would only be needed for those who don't want to read.
Listen to your management. They get it, you don't.
[+] [-] NikolaNovak|10 months ago|reply
I found it (eventually....) futile to rage against corporate culture of misuse of slides for purposes other than presentation. That's likely where your disconnect lies though. Hope you have better luck than I did long term!
[+] [-] ewhanley|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] conradfr|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bartread|10 months ago|reply
It sounds like the best policy is to carry on ignoring them.
[+] [-] ksec|10 months ago|reply
The world should have learned what a great presentation is and what presentation software should be like. And yet nearly 20 years later No Slides or presentation software, including MS Powerpoint is even at the level of Keynote in 2007.
If there is one thing I learned, is that even if you ask people to copy, making a 100% exact replica in itself is hard enough. Most people cant even copy exact and they ignore the small details. They copy and make things worse much like Microsoft in the 90s and 00s.
And this at the end may come down to taste. Just like Stave Jobs said, the biggest problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste. They do not have the craftsmanship or the product genius to make a call on what is a great product or a bad product. Instead a great product is distilled into one that sell or not, by the sales and marketing people, which is the current Apple.
[+] [-] KronisLV|10 months ago|reply
Even that once failed me. I was to give a presentation about a paper I did at my university and I had used some fonts in it that I rather liked. The problem was that the computer didn't like them (and they weren't actually embedded within the PDF), which lead to all of the text in the presentation being cut off and more or less ruined it.
Now it's PDF/A or nothing, thankfully even LibreOffice Impress lets me export those files under File > Export as > Export as PDF > General > Archival (PDF/A, ISO 19005): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A#Description
No animations or other dynamic content, but for those I can just link to YouTube or show a local MP4 file or whatever. It's simple and hasn't failed me since. Oh also, if a computer at a given place has a web browser, then it's possible to open those files. No other software needed, no logins to web platforms that must be up, nothing.
[+] [-] gherkinnn|10 months ago|reply
https://ia.net/presenter
[+] [-] ghaff|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] sunrunner|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] 369548684892826|10 months ago|reply
0: https://marp.app/
[+] [-] RestartKernel|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] aosaigh|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] immibis|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] wiseowise|10 months ago|reply
Every software:
* Should operate offline
* Should export and work with locally saved (preferably) human readable format
[+] [-] daemin|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] DaSHacka|10 months ago|reply
Sometimes, for especially important talks, I even bring two laptops pre-provisioned with the slides just in case one has technical issues for some reason or another.
Its not that much extra work, and should the preparations pay off even once makes every bit of the toil well worth it. Nothing worse than embarrassing yourself in a room full of your colleagues, even moreso if the talk will be recorded and posted online for others to witness in perpetuity.
[+] [-] ghaff|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rhubarbtree|10 months ago|reply
(One is a bug when clicking the colour palette sometimes deselects the selected object: the other is that you can’t start with a rectangle and change it to a rounded rectangle)
If anyone from the Keynote team reads this, I just want to say - you are absolute heroes.
[+] [-] uxcolumbo|10 months ago|reply
I also try to avoid cloud first. If servers are slow or down or you're locked out for whatever reason, you won't have access to your own files.
Prefer apps like Powerpoint or Keynote. Local first and back up to the cloud.
[+] [-] cosmic_cheese|10 months ago|reply
I still use Sketch instead of Figma for projects that are solo and where collaboration doesn’t require that the other participants have edit capabilities for this reason (among others).
Not only is it weird that with Figma you don’t get to keep a local file if you don’t constantly export to keep your local copy up to date, it means that your full fidelity work is locked up in a proprietary format that’s subject to sudden change at the company’s whims, breaking any tools reverse engineered for the purpose of liberating users’ work.
By contrast, while Sketch has a cloud mode it can also be local-first and its maker publishes an open spec for its file format. That’s the right way to do things.
[+] [-] tobr|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] sebastiennight|10 months ago|reply
- unneeded AI visuals
and
- huge walls of AI prose that are completely impossible to read at a distance
I do not understand why those slide-generator startups overdo it so much, when it seems the "one visual per slide" paradigm is both a much better experience for the audience, and would also be so much easier to generate.
[+] [-] an0malous|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tomsmeding|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] user_7832|10 months ago|reply
Presentations seem to be a way of getting whatever text and photos you want to put, and hope the reader can read between the lines and get value out of it. Just look at powerpoint’s smart art examples for starters… and compare them with any professional published report by any large agency. A medium which allows animations should not be behind a static PDF, yet if you want to make your ppt that polished you need to spend an inordinate amount of time as ppt doesn’t support any of the nicer stuff natively.
I haven’t used miro’s extension for powerpoint but I suspect whatever it allows would be far superior to what Microsoft allows natively.
[+] [-] lauritz|10 months ago|reply
What drives me nuts, however, is the lacking vector workflow in Keynote. The only way to export vector graphics is by exporting as a PDF. Import is similarly difficult. I wonder how this is done internally at Apple, but I would assume that everything we see these days in the keynotes is done using Motion anyways.
[+] [-] pjmlp|10 months ago|reply
At least reveal.js is understandable due to its programming focus and automating slide generation with multiple output formats.
[+] [-] rchaud|10 months ago|reply
Figma is following the Dropbox blueprint of building vendor lock-in (who is using Dropbox Paper??), and part of that involves creating senseless roadblocks (can save to local file, can't present locally!) to keep users inside their "ecosystem".
[+] [-] ryukoposting|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] airstrike|10 months ago|reply
That's why I'm building a slideshow editor that is fast, cross-platform, offline-first but also viewable online. I can't wait to share it with HN....soon
[+] [-] travisgriggs|10 months ago|reply
I know that may be an unpopular position (a younger developer recently told me so), because LOTS of people have invested heavily in skills to try and make this work, but I just don't see it. The single appeal a web app has its potential for cross platform deployment. It has not been my experience that having to write apps in 3 different computer language styles spread across at least two maybe connected CPUs will end up a better overall end user experience than a purpose built single platform executable that leverages the user's host operating system. YMMV
[+] [-] bryanhogan|10 months ago|reply
Figma's new Website Builder is even much worse.
I wouldn't put my trust into anything Figma is doing these days. It's still a great app for visual design, but with the current trajectory that might also change soon. Ever since the Adobe incident my trust in them has been greatly reduced.
[+] [-] rchaud|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mgaunard|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dostick|10 months ago|reply
Nobody asked for figjam and slides, those are created to build growth for investors. Effort spent on those products should have been spent on fixing Figma “design” product.
They employ hundreds in customer support. Figma forums is a customer defusal machine giving a sense of attention with “thank you for the feedback” and nothing ever gets fixed.
What can you expect from a product that was a result of arbitrary choice by a guy who needed a use case for their real-time JS communication library.