Show HN: Slipshow – A presentation tool not based on slides (opens in new tab)

I get that it’s usually seen as bad practice to write down all the points and read from the slides, but honestly, I like that style sometimes. My monkey brain gets distracted easily, and I often lose track. Having detailed agendas displayed on the screen helps me follow along better.

Yes, clearly this is not for every usecase.

I think math lectures often need quite some text support, they are the reason I created Slipshow.

Very cool! I had never seen something like that!

Sometimes, I used the analogy of a big papyrus roll (like this one: https://pgi-shop.de/en/papyrus-roll-20-x-80-double/) to explain what is Slipshow. But your analogy is much better!

I thought you were talking about the lecture theaters where there were 6-8 giant boards arranged on the wall with pulley systems so the lecturer can raise/lower them and access them independently, kind of like in [0]. Some of the setups are have enough writable area that it's not even really practical to fill them all up in a 2-hour lecture period. Using the available space in a smart way is definitely a learned skill; it's far too easy to start in the "wrong" place and end up needing to write "board via"s / "goto"s.

Do companies still do whiteboard interviews anymore for engineers? Whiteboard management in that context was also a learnable skill, though easier than managing multiple movable boards.

[0] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-awesome-schools-like-MIT-UCs-an...

When I was in college they would use a transparency projector, but instead of transparency pages, there would be a roll with a crank that you would turn to advanced the roll. You would get the same effect as slipshow.

Prezi lost me a PhD co-advisor, this person only liked traditional slide formats. In retrospect, this was a good thing to not have this person oy board. I used it pretty close to traditional slides, but they could not be made happy unless it was powerpoint... Separately, I did have a lot of fun making a Prezi to explain how GPUs worked for another class, which went over swimmingly for a different audience.

I ended up using reveal.js for my defense slides because the 2D slide grid allows you to go deep on a subject and keep the main flow clean.

I see a huge markdown fan! I'm on the same page! We're building an entire ecosystem for markdown slides for the same reason.

The same design for all slides in the same workspace, a hosted version for non-developers, each slide has its own public url for easy slide playback, and more ...

Try if you are interested in slidepicker.com (beta)

I've wanted to love MARP for years but the documentation is so limited (and tutorials so sparse) that building a presentation with any complexity beyond the basics is almost impossible unless you have a solid understanding of CSS and YAML front matter.

It's a shame, because I think the idea of MARP is revolutionary, but in practice PowerPoint (or even free alternatives like Google Slides) is easier to use.

IA Presenter creates slide decks from markdown:

https://ia.net/presenter

Thanks for the link, and the idea! Definitely a github action to automatically publish your Slipshow presentation on push would be a great workflow! (I'll open an issue for that!)

Also, Quarto to reveal.js is an amazing pipeline, and ties in well with the rest of the Quarto ecosystem meaning that you can reuse content from other mediums more easily.

If I'm understanding it correctly, I think it renders your presentation to an html file that you can just open in a browser. I assume the effects and transitions are all powered by embedded JS. So it should be portable.

This. It's notebooks as presentations and I'll argue there is nothing about slides that explicitly prevents you from taking this visual approach, but for the case where you want less flexibility it could make sense.

Good question :) Many reasons, I could make a blog post about it!

First, let me start with the biggest drawback of using OCaml: it might prevent potential contributors from making contributions. That is very sad!

However, OCaml is the language I know the most. I use it at work and I'm very very satisfied with it. It's main strengths for me are its type system for maintainability, the tools around it (the lsp server, the build system dune, the autoformatter ocamlformat, ...) and the fact that it can compiles to Javascript! It also has some libraries of very high quality.

With a "single" codebase, leveraging the javascript ecosystem, I could make the compiler work as a statically linked binary, as a node script published on npm, inside a Tauri app, and inside a VSCode plugin. ("single" codebase in quote since I needed some specific code for each application, but the core logic is shared.)

For sure, the same could have been made with another language, but I knew OCaml, and knew I would have a pleasant experience using it for that.

(I even plan to rewrite the engine in OCaml. The engine was written in javascript quite quickly, at a time when I had no experience with largish projects. It is now very difficult to maintain and extend.)

I don't know Miro or Figjam very well, but I would say that:

- You can write a Slipshow presentation in Markdown, which can be more convenient than in those collaborative whiteboards (depending on the person): the source file is plain text. - Slipshow is made for presentations, so it is themed for that: the usual ratio for the screen, blocks such as example/theorem/definition, titles, ... - It is easy in Slipshow to reveal new content/go to a new position by simply pressing the "right arrow" key. - The output from Slipshow is a single file that you can view offline, send to your audience, ...

There might be more differences. For sure, those tools are different and adapted to a purpose, or a style of presenting. For some kind of presentations, Miro and Figjam might be much better than Slipshow!

If you need to give a classic 5 min presentation then Miro/FigJam is overkill.