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.
> As an FYI, we _do_ use Figma Slides internally for pretty much everything
I think this is part of the issue. How much of the internal use stays within the editor view? Do you have any internal stakeholders who won’t click a Figma link and instead want a PPT or PDF? Because those are normal requests for presentations - but not ones that you’d find with internal use.
For example, there needs to be a way to export to PDF that’s less than several hundred MB. And the PPT export is hopelessly broken - the outputs look like a clipped ransom letter.
I'm usually building my slides in Figma (the original app), and I've learnt to run the PDF exported by it (hundreds of MB) through Adobe "Compress PDF" online utility that gets it to <10 MB. Would be great for the Figma-exported PDF to be small right away.
on a tangent, being in the video industry, for me to see a file only in the hundreds of MBs wouldn't even get my attention. it's funny how used to the boiling water one gets when it happens slowly. of course a PDF is not a video file, so maybe something would feel hinky???
sending files over email is just extremely common, staying lower than 15mb is almost a requirement to facilitate easy communication in many businesses
Also, I tend to have OneDrive sync my active projects, including the steerco and update slidedecks, to my iPad, to read on my iPad when travelling or commuting. Small decks are so much more pleasant to deal with, and can easily sync over a mobile connection
Regardless of the specific bugs he ran into, it is a product that only works well online, despite how difficult it is for a user to know for sure ahead of time what kind of connection will be available when it counts. Isn’t that just a fundamental miscalculation for this type of product? It’s almost guaranteed to put a certain percentage of your users in an embarrassing situation in front of an audience.
There is an offline feature, it just didn’t work properly.
Having offline access to documents is a solved problem in cloud-backed apps, including Figma. All of the comments about the cloud component must be from people who have never used Figma. It’s not an inherently broken thing, it was just broken in Slides.
Figma’s other tools are generally good. That’s why it’s so confusing that they released Slides in such a broken state.
But I’m talking about Slides, not Figma in general. Presentation software actually working correctly when you have your presentation is mission-critical.
>despite how difficult it is for a user to know for sure ahead of time what kind of connection will be available
In 2025 it's a safe assumption to assume the user always has internet access. I've never had to worry if I will have internet access when I go to an event.
The user will always have internet access - except when it suddenly drops out during that one critical meeting.
Doing a presentation at a conference? The hotel promised there would be "internet", but failed to mention all 10.000 attendees would be sharing a 10Mbps link. Doing a presentation at another company? They've got an overly-aggressive firewall on the guest network, so Figma isn't loading - and your provider decided to temporarily block your 5G tethering due to "misuse". Presenting a keynote at Computex? Guess Figma is having an outage, better tell the hundreds of journalists to come back tomorrow!
Your internet may have always worked so far. Are you willing to bet your career on some random 3rd party internet connection - or Figma itself - never having an outage?
> Doing a presentation at another company? They've got an overly-aggressive firewall on the guest network
This happened to me lol. I copied a demo video from our landing page, and the host company somehow blocked our CDN, so the demo slide is just a blank page. Have to mouth the whole demo from memory, not too bad but it's really awkward.
> The article said that it handles drops of internet connections fine.
I ... don't think it does? It states the exact opposite at least twice:
> Just because you have a presentation open and loaded, doesn’t mean you can present it. If you are offline when you actually click Present, it will barf.
> Once you are presenting, you can click to “download” the presentation to be available offline – but be careful not to close the tab or it will undownload!
Events are actually one of the last places in the populated world without reliable internet, either from dead zones in a lot of facilities or overloaded wifi & local networks.
This is a bad assumption to make. There are infinitely many reasons why the internet could be not working currently. This is just lazy engineering and a lack of testing.
That doesn't change the fact that your point about internet always being available is not accurate at events with lots of people where networks may struggle or be overwhelmed, and there is a lot of interference. Not to mention, devices can have issues, there can be interference, etc.
When I walk into a client's office for a meeting, I like to be able to plug into a projector and talk through my slides (which I export to PDF for simplicity). I don't want to have to ask for a guest Wifi password or anything else technical. As a result, I usually give presentations offline, unless the projector needs me to connect over the internet. Sure I could tether my laptop to my phone, but why add a dependency?
Thanks Grey – other than the presenting-at-an-event flow I do really did like the Figma Slides experience, so this is great to hear. The world is better off with a strong Figma.
This is the epitome of “on our low latency 10 Gbps dedicated link to our servers it works fine!” response that I’ve learned to expect from all large corporations.
Now try your product, but use only WiFi tethering to spotty 4G… shared with fifty other people and tell me your cloud service “just works”.
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.
Two slide decks combined into one. Each presented slide should have a hidden slide immediately following that is the corporate style info dump. Then you get the best of both worlds.
When you present it - It’s a nice deck of slides that keep people interested and help them to listen to the presentation. But when they download the deck, they see the slides that have all the details.
The notes in each slide, go into detail. I also like to use transitions and animations (not too obnoxious, though). Many of the slides in the shows referenced below, need to be played, as they may have a number of "steps."
Makes it worthwhile to ask for my slides, and helps me to stay on track. I generally don't read the notes verbatim, but stay on the topics they describe.
I think you may have misunderstood what an "annotated presentation" is.
It's not a new way of giving presentations. It's a way of publishing your presentations after you have given them where you turn the slides into a longer form written piece.
So it can't be "not a good way to do a presentation at all", because I give presentations exactly the same as everyone else does! Slides with images and a few words.
What's different is that I take the time to write them up properly afterwards.
What's appropriate amount of information in the slides depends on the nature of the presentation.
For short focused presentations (<10 min) minimal slides are the best if the verbal presentation is strong. For longer and more complicated ones more detailed slides are better for the audience. Audience will get distracted or misdirected at times, and making a clear and well flowing enough speech for more detailed and longer presentations is extremely hard.
I think of the (imo legendary) presentation Jobs gave when introducing the iPhone. A brand new product with features and usage patterns that most people never saw before in a mobile device.
It had very little of those highly detailed bullet point slides, but you didn’t feel like after watching that presentation you didn’t “get it”.
That’s the barometer I think about when it comes to presentations
OK, fine, when I'm introducing a new cell phone model to the public, I'll do it Jobs's way. But that's not optimal for an in-depth technical presentation with actual content behind it. It will annoy the present audience and frustrate future readers.
The idea that one presentation style fits every audience, every product, every scenario is just weird. Nothing else on the planet works that way, so why should slide decks?
Completely agree. Ironically, by focusing on Jobs' presentations, people are admiring the type of presentation that they will probably never do, and they do not consider that it probably cost 100s of man-hours to prepare it. I think it is more important to develop more practical skills to communicate effectively whatever you need, while not spending too much time on the deck preparation.
I’m talking about the delivery. It’s not a lot of fluff, relies more on visuals / demos / examples than bullet points and is information dense and perhaps most importantly it’s well paced.
In my opinion this works well for technical presentations. I’ve given more than a few talks following the style and I’ve always been told it’s good stage presence and I’ve gotten a lot of compliments from the audience
I got around this by keeping the slides simple but dumping all the supplementary information, including most/all of the presentation content, into the notes section of each slide.
That way if I sent people the deck they'd still have all the content.
It's a while since I put anything on Slideshare, and I think it now does include notes, but it used to annoy me that back in the day it didn't.
I fight to record any presentations I do as often as possible. When I am asked for the slides I send the full recording instead as the way to manage this exact issue.
Few things are as frustrating as finding slides from what seems to be an insightful talk strongly pertaining to what you are working on, but no recording of that talk to watch.
I applaud the effort to record such talks, especially in the current age where you know few people will actually watch it and appreciate your effort (but some big LLM provider will certainly lift it as part of a mass scrape and charge a few bucks for access to your findings without crediting you).
If information is important enough to bother someone asking for a copy of it, but not important enough to spend an hour ingesting, I'm not sure what to tell you.
The thing is: When working with the material afterwards the important part are the small details. The talk/recording are good for the high level overview and following along on the big picture, but for details it is annoying as one has to jump around for specific words and phrases. Something written or an image/diagram is a lot better to study in depth.
And there lies the trouble with slides: During a talk they should support what is being said, but they are often abused as also being the handout for afterwards.
It sounds like you want detailed documentation. That’s fine, but that’s not what a talk is. A good talk isn’t a reference. And good documentation isn’t an engaging talk.
If people want that, produce two artifacts. Don’t try shoehorn a talk into being documentation. That’s just a recipe for bad work.
It depends on what the talk is about. Of course Steve Jobs' of cited iPhone introduction didn't have any details for in depth research later on, but was a high level product introduction.
A technical talk however explains a concept, a tool or something and thus contains technical information to follow up with, but for that I need the words, the phrases stated so I even know what to look for in the manual. And probably I want to follow it in the order they presented it (I hope they thought about the order they presented it in!) however the manual is ordered more in a reference order.
So yeah, if you do a high level marketing talk it doesn't matter, but then I also won't spend the time on watching a second time. If it has technical depth, then being able to follow the depth is good.
I have dealt with this issue as well before. If folks need something more in depth I will use a LLM + some massaging of my own to create a supporting document. Here is an example of a very disorganized conversation and the supporting document I made with it: https://www.danielvanzant.com/p/what-does-the-structure-of-l... It has clear definitions of the key terms. Timestamps for the important moments, and links to external resources to learn more about any of the topics.
For most talks, I would say no. If I were going to a lecture by Pynchon (ha!) I would want to listen at 1x. For 99% of talks at conferences which are mostly just a way of communicating technical data, a text transcription that is then reduced in word count by 50% is probably only a very small loss (if that), and a 90%+ time savings.
This gives me an idea for a website. All of the talks of a conference, audio transcribed and LLM summarized into 3-minute reads.
It might be worth doing the whole INFOCON archive…
The slices of a good presentation are worthless without the presentation itself. If the deck is valuable in and of itself, it could have just been an email or word doc in the first place.
Well, it's not the reality of most slides I've seen. Most of them seem to be a pretty good summary of the talk. Weirdly, some of them contain more information than the talk.
I do believe most presentations I've seen could've been an email or an article. So I guess I agree with you?
> I do believe most presentations I've seen could've been an email or an article. So I guess I agree with you?
Yeah, I really should have said that in my original post. Most presentations could have been a one pager, and any presentation worth sitting through the slides aren't worth having.
Always recording is a good practice I think. It's so cheap with video conferencing that you might as well. Even if nobody uses it later, it didn't cost much. And if you get that one presentation that provides stellar value it's a gift that keeps on giving.
I don't really agree that a recording is always better than the slides. Slides are a text medium, and as such can be searched. You can also go through them much, much faster than through a recording (even if you can listen at 2x). If you're just looking for something specific, slides can be much better.
And sometimes you need to get the whole experience. And then the recording is much better.
Yeah, recordings are fine for those who missed it. And with video conferencing recording is so easy that you might as well do it, living the motto "better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it".
But when someone specifically asks for slides, it just feels like a dick move to say "you don't want the slides, rewatch the whole presentation instead".
Sometimes you're just looking for the link on slide 45, the pithy problem description on slide 5, or, y'know, you just want to quickly go through the main points again.
Why would I want to listen or watch a presentation (even sped up), when I can read a transcript many times faster, can scan through for the bits that are most relevant, and can quickly jump back to review something if I want to?
It's only when you read the transcript of pretty much any presentation or podcast that you realise how superficial most are and how low the information density actually is.
There exists a slider at the bottom of most videos you can click and drag to your prefered location /s
A video of the presentation is pretty much always better than just the slides. Even if you got the slides you'd have to click through them to find the one you were looking for. Your argument could just as easily be phrased:
"What do you expect people to do with that? Click through and read every slide?"
And it would make about as much sense as the original argument (none).
> Your argument could just as easily be phrased: "What do you expect people to do with that? Click through and read every slide?"
I've had considerable practice at reading. Learned it at a young age, and I got to be pretty good at it over the years. I can get through a slide deck much faster reading it than watching a presentation.
Thank you for pointing out that watching the presentation and clicking through the slides takes you just as long. I assumed most people were at my level of reading speed. It must've been hard coming forward like that. I'm sorry I made you go through that. In the future I will check my privilege.
I've experienced the same thing. I work with ad agencies, and it's common for my client to then turn around and present the same information to their clients, so they'll ask me to put every last word on the slide. It hurts my soul.
I call it two kinds of slides: presentation slides and reading slides. The latter type probably should be a different type of document, but they are wildly popular.
And since you're often expected to hand over the slides afterwards, I try to find a middle ground. The slide will have more than 5 words, but hopefully not too many. Pictures/graphs help with this.
One thing I like to do is interleave these two kinds of slides one by one. Put your visual on one slide, and longer-text bullet points on the next.
Then while presenting the visual you have the bullets of the next slide in your presenter's view, and you can just skip that slide during the presentation. Then, when people ask for the slides they will indeed get all they want.
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
This is good advice for boring talks, and the kinds of people who make them.
Imagine the same advice being given to standup comedians: “Bits should be a medium size, not too long.” “Avoid long words and try not to alienate your audience”. What a snooze fest!
A good talk is a performance piece. It should be simultaneously entertaining and informative. You do that by using narrative, by connecting with the audience, and by being compelling (via emotion and showing your own pleasure to the audience). If the audience is so busy reading your slides that they don’t pay attention to you, you’ve failed as a speaker.
I’m going to take a big risk here. I challenge you to go watch any great talk online, in just about any field. Watch Steve jobs introduce the iPhone. Watch a standup comedian. Watch a tech demo. Or your favourite conference speech. Or any popular YouTuber. They will almost never be this kind of talk, with subheadings and the appropriate amount of “supportive graphics”.
These “rules” are well meaning, but mediocre. They might even be helpful for a lot of people. But you should aspire higher. Aim to give a great talk. Not just a talk that’s slightly less horrible than your peers.
I couldn't agree more. These "rules" are to help people avoid really really bad presentations. They shouldn't be viewed as an official way of making good presentations.
The "say what you're going to say, say it and then say what you said" rule is probably the worst offender here. It's meant to stop people missing out important context but very often it just leads to boring repetition.
Funny you should mention stand-up comedians because the best presentation advice I ever got came from a workshop my company arranged that was given by a standup comedian. His main message was to follow the "hero's tale" format, which you'd think doesn't apply to tech presentations, but you'd be surprised how often it actually does.
> * Ideally, a table of contents should be understandable by itself. In particular, it should be comprehensible before someone has heard your talk.
The typical agenda slide often is more than useless in my opinion.
There are cases where it is good - if you have a recording and discuss individual topics and thus can jump around (but then have time marks as well and jump options in the player), but 99% of agendas are useless and speakers waste a lot of time on them (1. Introduce the speaker 2. Introduce the problem 3. Show old solutions 4. Show the new solution 5. Summary)
A ToC slide should typically be avoided -- especially if you only show it once.
Advice I heard but don't know the source of: audiences tend to have a "stack" of about 7 items, possibly less. Only put stuff on the stack you are going to use.
A linear story fits well with this advice. A ToC breaks linearity and tries to push all of its items onto the stack, without any payoff. Within 2 slides, the audience has forgotten your ToC slide, since there's no point to keeping it on the stack. Best case, there's some minor payoff -- but almost never worth the cost of saturating the stack. Most often, it is an unnecessary crutch. So unless it is mandatory (could be for students), just make your presentation's narrative flow logically instead.
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."
I use the “notes” section for more detailed content. Doesn’t help if I have to share physical copies of the deck, but works fine if I pass along the whole file.
I like to do this, and have done so for our pitch deck as well, where I've got the "presentation" deck which I can run through in 1-5 minutes, vs the "shareable" deck with way too much info per slide.
Having a separate presentation deck also allows for stories and visuals (eg personal photos) that I never include in the shared deck.
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.
The best presentation ever was at the time consoles pricing was around 350 and there was no console like the Playstation One and the Sony representative said: 299 and walks away, it does not matter the powerpoint software used, why a product is revolutionary is what matters. I don't care who was the Sony presenter.
...and it gets worse: this type of presentation is easily 10x more work to prepare, practice & deliver, and totally under-appreciated by the promoters of reading a wall of text. I went to business school, so basically have a Bachelor's of Power Point, and my tolerance for shity slide decks is close to zero.
> They just don’t get it. What comprises a good presentation.
I take it one could argue between what's a presentation and a talk but to me one of the very best presentation I've seen is Rich Hickey presenting Clojure.
Then there's "Simple made easy" considered by many to be one of the greatest ever:
There are many bullet points: but he'll go through each them and only show the next bullet point once he's done with the previous one. He even kids about a made up graph on one of the slide.
I think that what makes a good presentation depends a lot on what's being presented.
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.
> The world should have learned what a great presentation is and what presentation software should be like.
The underlying difference can not be fixed by software, because software can't make you care about or value things: Jobs saw presentations as performances.
I don't mean that in a dismissive way, I mean that Jobs treated presentations as plays and musicals. Few people are willing (let alone able) to block out days in order to rehearse and fine tune a presentation. Even less so days of multiple people in order to get feedback and suggestions. In real world settings.
Even just rehearsing twice - once to yourself, perhaps in front of a camera to watch back and check timings, and once in front of a spouse or coworker - puts you ahead of 99% of corporate presenters.
And it shows. Even at large events half the presenters appear to have never even seen the deck before and revert to Storytime with CEO as they read the slides to you.
> Even at large events half the presenters appear to have never even seen the deck before
In my experience in academia, most of them wrote the slides just before going up to present
In fact it seems to be almost a badge of honour for the older professors. They pride themselves on giving lazy and unprepared talks. Why? Because it shows that they have earned not having to care anymore, they are powerful enough now that they don't have to perform
Also the slide deck is often dual purpose. Often it's an OK presentation, and an OK document for people who need you to break it into paragraphs and explain each paragraph.
Yes, Tufte hated this, because presentations should be presentations, and people should read the accompanying technical report.
Maybe I should rehearse, spend more money (normally out of my own pocket as I don't have access to a graphics staff), and otherwise prepare more for a conference presentation, which may be 50 people or fewer. But that's probably not realistic. I think I do a decent job in general. I could probably do better. But everything is a tradeoff.
Maybe controversial opinion, I'm not sure most people can learn much useful from Steve Jobs, and trying to emulate his presentations.
He had a huge support team to help him polish, and was very skilled. It feels like someone who has never driven a car trying to learn by watching Formula 1. Yes their drivers are amazing at drivers, but you can't really complain when your delivery drivers can't hit F1 speeds.
If you've been to SaaS product conferences, they are ALL doing the Steve Jobs thing of presenting slide decks that are basically advertisements of new features. All fluff and stock images, very little substance. The implementation details and all their asterisks are provided by your account manager/sales engineer.
Try doing that when presenting a proposal or project results to senior leadership at your company, and see how quickly you get placed into PIP.
Doing a sales pitch to C suite person on your hobby horse is likely to get in as much trouble as doing a technical deep dive into the same topic to the same person.
> The implementation details and all their asterisks are provided by your account manager/sales engineer.
That's because the purpose of the presentation is to get you to talk to your account manager.
Having worked on presentation software, it's more complicated than what it looks like in its surface.
First, considering the base/generic case, you can't really beat Powerpoint, Keynote and Google Slides, they are somewhat free/included in basic accounts, they will get the job done, people are used to Powerpoint, and it's not the core product of any of these companies, there's very little incentive for them to improve that.
Second, because you can't compete on base case, a company needs to target those who will willingly pay for presentation software, that's sales and marketing, they don't care about beautiful software, they care about conversion and data.
And lastly, most presentations are bland, the more you invest in a great creation and editing experience, the more complicated it gets and makes it less likely that people who just want to create basic presentations actually do it, doesn't matter if you have tutorials or templates, they will make crappy presentations to get the job done, if they try to do add a little touch to it they will likely overuse animations or similar features and make it even crappier.
In the end there are very few people who put effort into creating actual presentation decks, the actual content being presented is far more important or a presentation is often a hurdle to get over with, such as doing internal presentations or presenting your school assignments.
Even in conferences you still get really bad presentations, the better ones are mostly remembered not because of the quality of the slides, but the contents and the skills of the presenter.
It's really too bad nobody has been able to step into the role Steve had for the industry. We lack the ability to effectivly communicate what's new and exciting to people and it's effecting the moral across the board.
Now it's hypemen with teams of engineers pushing their solutions more and more.
I'm not saying Steve didn't contribute to hype, but somehow he made it feel natural and welcome.
There is a niche that is left empty for Jobs' style of presentation.
> We lack the ability to effectivly communicate what's new and exciting to people and it's effecting the moral across the board.
I have a harder time with this.
The last presentation that stuck with me is Framework's 12 inch laptop [0]. It's absolutely not polished, the camera shakes, I don't know if they even rehearsed it or made multiple takes. And they seem to be conscious enough to have publicly asked for video producers to contact them to make better videos.
But that presentation gets to the viewer everything it needs to, it's clear, well explained, succinct, and makes you want to go buy it now if the product is for you.
I don't want the second coming of Steve Jobs with graphs with no Y axis or reality distortion fields. I want companies confident enough that their products can mostly speak for themselves and only need simple and straight explanations.
> It's absolutely not polished, the camera shakes, I don't know if they even rehearsed it or made multiple takes. And they seem to be conscious enough to have publicly asked for video producers to contact them to make better videos.
One of the things that is clear from watching that video (which is great by the way), is that they tell this story day in day out. They know their story, and they know their audience wants to see the detail they're sharing. Posting the M1 Macbook reveal [0] isn't going to turn the head of someone who wants replacable RAM in their laptop, but having someone take it apart on their desk is.
He did present things as revolutionary that already shipped months ago elsewhere, and this was irritating at times. But. This is exactly the point that so many other companies/brands missed. Serve your usebase, make the product revolutionary with as boring tech as possible.
Yes of course Apple, a fantastically capital-strong enterprise did spend a lot on tech R&D, but they usually did their own non-standard thing. (Vertical integration, the consequence of narrow focus, later the advantage of product/brand differentiation.) Of course, again, all possible due to the wildly successful Mac/MacBooks.
> He did present things as revolutionary that already shipped months ago elsewhere, and this was irritating at times.
He knew that who did it first didn’t matter as much as the first one to do it right. New technology can’t be revolutionary if the products it’s sold in flop or never escape their tiny niche, no matter how cool it is.
Mac and MacBooks were not wildly successful back then. iPods were, though. I can’t find a graph for 2000s, but Apple desktop and computers started being used more after iPhone came out (and after MacBook Air came out).
They did, I am just disputing the notion that they were “wildly” successful.
iPod and iPhones I would describe as wildly successful. Even AirPods. Even iPads. They were THE device to get in that market segment, and if you looked around lots of people had them. The M processor MacBooks are also wildly successful. But I don’t remember the iMacs being like that in early 2000s.
> He did present things as revolutionary that already shipped months ago elsewhere, and this was irritating at times.
It was irritating to a specific brand of nerd who valued "doing it first" over "doing it right". They were a fascinating sideshow back then, if not a little irritating themselves. To see someone write this in 2025 is like learning about the Japanese holdouts after World War II.
I still think they are not doing things right. (Their UI continues to look and feel crazy. Hardware is amazing, software is made for a circus show. Just give some simple task that involves Finder, or any settings on any of their device.)
But it was way more snappier than the median Android device, and usually looked more consistent too.
Thats a good observation. Never thought about this but nobody recent comes to mind. These days everything feels pushed on us. Like we are just a role in their agenda of ushering the world into VR experiences for example. Steve had a way of delivering what we were waiting for and truly wanted. That probably helped the presentation of it all
It did help that Steve was alive during the personal computing revolution. He was a big part in shaping it but it was also just a good time to be in his position.
There's not been the same kind of thing for a while. His death came as personal computers had managed their way fully into our pockets.
Now there are new technologies, but nothing I think we all agree is as ubiquitous as the PC. Even AI is hard to sell because unlike the word processor or the portable music device, AI isn't always functional, and so it doesn't feel as much like a complete solution.
Technology is suffering more and more from itself lately, and I really hope a leader will emerge and help us take an honest look at ourselves and what we accept in terms of usability. No more cookie warnings pretending they solve privacy issues, but complete overhauling of contracts and agreements between technology companies and users, just as an example.
It used to be everyone was normal and to become a billionaire you had to sell a product to a bunch of people. Now there are already billionaires, everyone's already indebted to several, and they basically compete with each other for market share.
I am curious what is so different about Keynote? I tried using it once for a few minutes in a computer lab years ago and while I remember some of the ways of doing things were different, I don't remember it being different. I was never that impressed with the quality of Steve Jobs' slides so maybe I'm missing something.
> The world should have learned what a great presentation is and what presentation software should be like
Bullshit. His style of presentation was suited for a very specific kind of communication that Apple marketing is now known for.
Slides are used in a far wider range of settings -- from classrooms to boardrooms -- where the effect of the Apple style would range between ineffective and detrimental.
I'm willing to bet Steve Jobs would have flayed the presenter if they had tried to present some internal technical presentation at Apple in that kind of style.
Let's not elevate form over function. Not all human communication is about tickling the cave brain and getting someone to buy a product.
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.
It's really too bad things like Electron aren't better, because making cross platform applications is kind of daunting and so a lot of places just put it on the web.
Libraries like PyQt (which Calibre uses, for instance) make it feasible at all. They still won't save you the moment you encounter any platform-specific corner case, of which there are uncountable multitudes.
Tip your OSS projects. They earned it more than you know.
I think it's still less than the amount of effort the VS Code team has put in trying to make Electron work. The guys (I believe only two) at Sublime HQ have managed to create a cross platform UI that is efficient and works well.
Kinda depends if you want to find developers willing and able to reinvent a lot of things or not. If you can justify rebuilding a textbox or scrollbar (for example) then perhaps you can roll your own solution. Otherwise you look for libraries.
The web is rich with 3rd party support for a lot of things, so as a platform it's attractive. If you need to grow, you can be more confident it will have what you need. But with that also comes a lot of bloat, legacy and poor decisions too.
Sometimes eye candy actually helps usability. There was a time when I would have argued Apple did this best, but lately I feel less this way. Still, look at apps like Zed. Beauty in its simplicity. That's worth a lot.
What frameworks like Qt often suffer from is an outdated or overly restrictive design language which is harder than worthwhile to customize, so you get apps that feel antiquated. Some people aren't as bothered by this as others, and generally I agree it shouldn't matter, but it does.
"Eye candy" also helps prevent the uncanny valley effect, but for ux.
On Mac OS, I can almost immediately tell when something is a QT app. It can be a beautifully well designed app, and my hindbrain is just screaming that it's not right. Take QGIS. Looks good, works well. But doesn't feel like a Mac app.
And it's not even about following all the Mac conventions. Sure, I like the Mac style preference panes OmniGraffle and Transmit have. But the telegram Mac client, written in swift, has it's own weird preference system, and still feels "right"
Electron apps, ironically, don't trigger the uncanny valley effect. Maybe it's because they all bring their own UX, instead of trying to ape platform ux, maybe it's because the font and other rendering is more polished, by virtue of being browser descended, but either way, they don't make me feel like I'm interacting with some weird not-quite Mac program.
Not all software is used hours a day. Some software needs to be intuitive so the user doesn’t need to invest hours to learn it. And visuals play a huge part in that.
They probably use something like Qt, which is probably what a lot more apps should use. But when you have a workforce that knows React, you build webapps.
The reason everything is SaaS and Cloud-based apps isn't technical, it's commercial. You have much more control online than offline, that's the number one reason. Everything else is so distant that you can ignore it for most intents and purposes.
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.
At one time, I had some accessories so that I could present from my phone if needed. I think I may even have used it once. But, yes, be prepared both in terms of gear and mentally for glitches. E.g. if your clicker isn't working be ready to smoothly transition to telling the AV team next slide or walking up to your laptop as appropriate.
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.
If you are presenting over zoom, you ideally want to put your full screen presentation on one screen (which is shared), and put the zoom screen on the other. So you know who is talking. Maybe look at chat.
Keynote, on a dual monitor setup, will takeover both screens, and will not allow something like the above. No options to disable dual screen usage. 5 years post-pandemic, after millions of presentations given over zoom, probably thousands given by Apple's own engineers, this is still not fixed.
Even if I make a presentation in keynote, I export to PDF.
And if monitor space is a premium or you don't have a second one you can use something like Deskpad (https://github.com/Stengo/DeskPad) to create a virtual one a window. This is also practical if you want to have the speaker view up.
I’m a Mac developer and when asked always say that my favorite app of all time is Keynote. It’s just so, so well done, and the epitome of a great Mac app. Would that all software had so much care for UX put into it.
> 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.
Figjam (digital whiteboarding, sticky notes) is okay, but one might move over to Miro or any other and it wouldn’t really matter which tool you use.
Everything else is a distraction. Devs don’t want or need dev mode.
Slides doesn’t make any sense, figma and figjam work just fine for presentation.
The AI tools are really bad (asking for layouts and stuff using AI in figjam is just broken)
Slides was literally made because they realised customers were using figma for presentations.
Being a tool native with the story teller is probably better. Heavily rehearsed presentations are dumb anyway inside a company, we’re not doing PR, there’s no black turtleneck here.
The best presentations at every level are a conversation between the presenter (trying to inform or spur a decision to be made) and the audience.
I really wished they had gone more the way of Linear - focus on doing a few things really well.
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.
In my opinion, it's a matter of mental framework. Presentations are not meant for a reader, they're meant for an audience, and if you try to make them readable, self contained, you're bound to fail. Presentations work best, or only, really, if they accompany a presenter, not the other way around.
For a lot of routine internal corporate stuff, they sort of need to do double duty and the presenter needs to just skip over reading a lot of the fine print. Even if they want to spend the time to create a separate document, most people won't read it.
For a conference presentation, I may create speaker notes or include a link to background material but basically I feel no requirement to try to put everything I may talk about on the page.
My take PowerPoint slides in private industry is that they are mostly analogous to what academics use poster presentations for.
They are narrated to small audiences of 1-10 (maybe 20) people at a time, who might want some notes to read before or share around.
IMO like posters they make for terrible presentations to very large groups and I kept questioning the design and purpose, but it seems to work for certain situations.
I might raise the number a bit (though most of the audience will be tuned out anyway) but absolutely. "Here's our plan for the Kumquat initiative." There are some high level points and a bunch of supporting data and detail which many people these days are used to reading in presentation format.
But I'd never give a presentation like that at a conference.
Client deck is tricky. In my prior stint as an IT industry analyst, I think we usually prepared a report of some sort if we weren't presenting. On the other hand, the client might prefer essentially a slide deck for internal purposes. Probably ask them what they want.
Presentation documents can never do double duty. They will always fail at least one of the goals, and if you insist on not optimizing for one, they will fail both.
Most routing corporate stuff is just people booking the time for denying others the excuse to say they didn't know about it because of time constraints. Those people don't care if the presentation fails to communicate anything (what it almost always does).
Most routine corporate stuff is basically a document in presentation form which a lot of people seem to prefer these days. Yes, you may give a 30 minute "presentation" using the "slides" but it's not really a presentation which I think is fine. I don't really disagree with your basic point. The sort of thing presented at larger team meetings I attended latterly tended to FYI sort of stuff, some of which was vaguely useful to know and some of which wasn't.
Ghaff’s comment already mentioned it but in my current use case (corporate) slides are very much supposed to be self contained. When I was a student I had no issues making pretty slides, but (fortunately?) almost never needed to have more than just some text and pictures in any slide.
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.
I've been drag-dropping pdf figures into slides since Keynote first came out. For charts it was such a relief from the crappy pixelated stuff that you still need to use for Powerpoint.
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
> 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
Invert this for developers, and now you know why people do it. There simply are very few better cross-platform UI tools and compliers. If you want the same fidelity everywhere, you pretty much have to rewrite it everywhere.
We’ll labor under web until users are so unhappy with it that the business financial benefit of “write once, run everywhere with a team of less specialized, cheaper engineers” is negated by users leaving the platform. But since users broadly don’t care, and it’s a lot cheaper & faster, we’ll keep using web. So it’s just so accessible, that more people will try to use your project in the web as opposed to an app.
End user experience is not what drives technical decisions in tech; money does.
Anyways, it’s not like apps are dead simple to get right either. It’s still very easy for a team to write a shitty native app. And if you’re writing N apps for N operating systems, without N teams of experienced developers, odds are at least one of those apps will suck. Similarly, a team of experts on the web, given the time & incentive to care about performance, can make incredibly performant web apps. (Not caring about performance and optimizing the experience is a problem with what companies prioritize financially, not with what developers care about.)
Mhmm not sure I'd agree that webapps have more edge cases than say, Jetpack compose (especially the PC version), or QML. Plus a huge advantage of web based stuff is that the edge cases are usually a lot more documented.
I say this as someone who has mostly used Qt+QML for some newer projects and came to regret it, in huge part due to a big lack of components, libraries etc. And very little documentation, or examples, outside of the official documentation.
Also, at my day job, they used to make all of their UI using Windows GUI frameworks (we sell very expensive testing devices mostly for industrial customers). It led to a big problem down the line, since we were stuck with using Windows, meaning that when we started shipping even smaller devices, it became a huge mess. In fact most of the devs are very glad that we moved to web based UIs since we don't have to rewrite everything for every single platform. I know, it's a tired point that everyone repeats but it is very very helpful especially for smaller dev teams. And even for our bigger teams, it made it easier to get a consistent and tested front end.
Sure, you can be multiplatform without using web, but you still end up with tons of edge cases and you still have to write a web version if you want your app to be accessible on the web too.
Figma wouldn't have been successful if it wasn't so easily accessible-through the web.
> Will we always labor under this "it must be a web app" burden?
Figma (the base app) actually works great and has for many years. It does not have these problems.
Figma Slides is a new feature they’re pushing. It has these issues because it appears to be unfinished and not well tested.
Everyone reaching to blame cross-platform or web technologies is missing the point. Figma can and does ship great apps within this framework. There’s something strange going on within Figma where the slides product is being neglected.
Interesting. I'm in a current development arc that includes some designers that LOVE Figma. They want me to love Figma. It's not bad, I don't hate it. But I don't love it. Oh... and I use the desktop app version. Because it works better.
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.
I make slides directly in the Figma design tool and post images of them into Google Slides. Figma Slides seems to just make everything harder than the default tool.
Every piece of presentation software will eventually flake out on you, I learned long ago that there should always be a plan B. I just make it a habit to always export my presentation as a PDF or PNGs so in the worst case, I can just open it up in Preview and flip through slides.
This whole article reads like a promotion for Apples Keynote masked behind a ridiculous concern "to finally upgrade my presentation tool". I'm guessing he didn't mention that Keynote comes with a price tag of the cheapest Mac computer... while the other is completely free.
Other than realtime collab and sync, which could be done in an app with a backing service, is there any reason Figma isn’t an app?
Other than: (1) modern devs don’t know how to build anything other than cloud SaaS, and (2) and most importantly it gives you undefeatable DRM and a subscription model?
I read about dogfooding and buzz about an internal testing chat channel, but no mention of running e2e suites that cover sanity checks or employing real UAT (I don’t consider “ping us in the bug channel” as UAT process).
The "Slide Sorter" view in PowerPoint/Keynote/Libre works similarly. High level thumbnail view of your slides, double click to "zoom in" (aka go to the actual slide).
This is in keeping with the overall problem Figma presents to organizations. If you create a place to design software in isolation while eagerly forgetting about real world software concerns, and you bump the seat license cost until only a few can have them, you're going to make early mistakes due to deliberately limited perspective, for which you'll pay later when they're more expensive to correct. Dev mode isn't there to bring in more perspective. It's there to keep the silos separate, for "handoff" rather than really working on it together.
Separately: It doesn't matter whether you downloaded the local app, it's thoroughly a SaaS product, and working offline is the exception to its rule.
I personally stopped using traditional presentation software altogether. These days, I build all my presentations using vibe coding tools. It might not be the fastest way to create a presentation, but it’s definitely the most fun. Plus, for animations, all you need to do is explain what you want, and most of the time, it just works. I even asked for speaker notes, and I had them ready in three prompts. Magic.
If you’re curious, I use Macaly for this (macaly.com).
I personally stopped using traditional methods for contributing to discussions altogether. Today, I just spit out thinly veiled ads using LLMs and it might not contribute to the discussion but at least it gets my product out there. If the OP has nothing do with what I'm advertising, even better.
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
PM at Figma here (for dev tools, not slides).
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.
> As an FYI, we _do_ use Figma Slides internally for pretty much everything
I think this is part of the issue. How much of the internal use stays within the editor view? Do you have any internal stakeholders who won’t click a Figma link and instead want a PPT or PDF? Because those are normal requests for presentations - but not ones that you’d find with internal use.
For example, there needs to be a way to export to PDF that’s less than several hundred MB. And the PPT export is hopelessly broken - the outputs look like a clipped ransom letter.
I'm usually building my slides in Figma (the original app), and I've learnt to run the PDF exported by it (hundreds of MB) through Adobe "Compress PDF" online utility that gets it to <10 MB. Would be great for the Figma-exported PDF to be small right away.
on a tangent, being in the video industry, for me to see a file only in the hundreds of MBs wouldn't even get my attention. it's funny how used to the boiling water one gets when it happens slowly. of course a PDF is not a video file, so maybe something would feel hinky???
It’s amazing how small text and images, even compressed video, can get compared to uncompressed video.
Caring a little bit will help save a bunch of space.
Does video these days really ever exist uncompressed other than when it's in transit, like through an HDMI cable or in a frame buffer?
Does anyone store uncompressed video these days? Honest question.
sending files over email is just extremely common, staying lower than 15mb is almost a requirement to facilitate easy communication in many businesses
Also, I tend to have OneDrive sync my active projects, including the steerco and update slidedecks, to my iPad, to read on my iPad when travelling or commuting. Small decks are so much more pleasant to deal with, and can easily sync over a mobile connection
Regardless of the specific bugs he ran into, it is a product that only works well online, despite how difficult it is for a user to know for sure ahead of time what kind of connection will be available when it counts. Isn’t that just a fundamental miscalculation for this type of product? It’s almost guaranteed to put a certain percentage of your users in an embarrassing situation in front of an audience.
There is an offline feature, it just didn’t work properly.
Having offline access to documents is a solved problem in cloud-backed apps, including Figma. All of the comments about the cloud component must be from people who have never used Figma. It’s not an inherently broken thing, it was just broken in Slides.
Figma’s other tools are generally good. That’s why it’s so confusing that they released Slides in such a broken state.
But I’m talking about Slides, not Figma in general. Presentation software actually working correctly when you have your presentation is mission-critical.
>despite how difficult it is for a user to know for sure ahead of time what kind of connection will be available
In 2025 it's a safe assumption to assume the user always has internet access. I've never had to worry if I will have internet access when I go to an event.
The user will always have internet access - except when it suddenly drops out during that one critical meeting.
Doing a presentation at a conference? The hotel promised there would be "internet", but failed to mention all 10.000 attendees would be sharing a 10Mbps link. Doing a presentation at another company? They've got an overly-aggressive firewall on the guest network, so Figma isn't loading - and your provider decided to temporarily block your 5G tethering due to "misuse". Presenting a keynote at Computex? Guess Figma is having an outage, better tell the hundreds of journalists to come back tomorrow!
Your internet may have always worked so far. Are you willing to bet your career on some random 3rd party internet connection - or Figma itself - never having an outage?
> Doing a presentation at another company? They've got an overly-aggressive firewall on the guest network
This happened to me lol. I copied a demo video from our landing page, and the host company somehow blocked our CDN, so the demo slide is just a blank page. Have to mouth the whole demo from memory, not too bad but it's really awkward.
>drops out during that one critical meeting
The article said that it handles drops of internet connections fine.
>sharing a 10Mbps link
You aren't streaming a video.
>They've got an overly-aggressive firewall on the guest network, so Figma isn't loading
Figma is an industry standard tool. It would be unlikely to be blocked.
>and your provider decided to temporarily block your 5G tethering due to "misuse"
You can probably present directly from your phone in this case.
>Guess Figma is having an outage, better tell the hundreds of journalists to come back tomorrow!
I guess so. Or the journalists can watch the livestream or a recording.
Sometimes I read comments and wonder how someone could be so divorced from reality.
> The article said that it handles drops of internet connections fine.
I ... don't think it does? It states the exact opposite at least twice:
> Just because you have a presentation open and loaded, doesn’t mean you can present it. If you are offline when you actually click Present, it will barf.
> Once you are presenting, you can click to “download” the presentation to be available offline – but be careful not to close the tab or it will undownload!
Events are actually one of the last places in the populated world without reliable internet, either from dead zones in a lot of facilities or overloaded wifi & local networks.
This is a bad assumption to make. There are infinitely many reasons why the internet could be not working currently. This is just lazy engineering and a lack of testing.
Which is why you need to weight then by likelihood. There will always be an infinite amount of things that can go wrong.
That doesn't change the fact that your point about internet always being available is not accurate at events with lots of people where networks may struggle or be overwhelmed, and there is a lot of interference. Not to mention, devices can have issues, there can be interference, etc.
No, it absolutely is not safe to assume that the user has Internet access, or that if they do the access is fast or reliable.
Figma Slides does not need fast and reliable internet.
Try connecting to the Wi-Fi at the London ExCeL or the Paris Expo sometime and then say that again with a straight face.
turn up during pre-conf, check your slides with conf IT, works beautifully.
Day of conf, 100x the number of users. Things go boom.
When I walk into a client's office for a meeting, I like to be able to plug into a projector and talk through my slides (which I export to PDF for simplicity). I don't want to have to ask for a guest Wifi password or anything else technical. As a result, I usually give presentations offline, unless the projector needs me to connect over the internet. Sure I could tether my laptop to my phone, but why add a dependency?
In 2025, what service provider are you using that never has service disruptions?
Having disruptions is handled fine as shown in the article.
You never actually did try to have a conference talk did you?
Thanks Grey – other than the presenting-at-an-event flow I do really did like the Figma Slides experience, so this is great to hear. The world is better off with a strong Figma.
This is the epitome of “on our low latency 10 Gbps dedicated link to our servers it works fine!” response that I’ve learned to expect from all large corporations.
Now try your product, but use only WiFi tethering to spotty 4G… shared with fifty other people and tell me your cloud service “just works”.
My guess is it’s probably due to AI assistants/vibe coding.
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.
Two slide decks combined into one. Each presented slide should have a hidden slide immediately following that is the corporate style info dump. Then you get the best of both worlds.
When you present it - It’s a nice deck of slides that keep people interested and help them to listen to the presentation. But when they download the deck, they see the slides that have all the details.
So kind of like a postcard where one side are pretty pictures and the other is the content?
I use slides, but heavy on the notes.
The notes in each slide, go into detail. I also like to use transitions and animations (not too obnoxious, though). Many of the slides in the shows referenced below, need to be played, as they may have a number of "steps."
Makes it worthwhile to ask for my slides, and helps me to stay on track. I generally don't read the notes verbatim, but stay on the topics they describe.
Examples: [0], [1], [2], [3], [4]
[0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY/ITCB-master/tree/master/P... (A couple of Keynote presentations that are part of a teaching module on Core Bluetooth)
[1] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qQDAuhGvBvBlZVH2zn_V... (Google Slides -Discusses effective communication)
[2] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11ZvUjZogJ86-AIsAv1Q3... (Google Slides -A basic -and dated- intro to the Swift Programming Language)
[3] https://littlegreenviper.com/cruft/CommunicationBasics.pptx (Downloads a PowerPoint for [1])
[4] https://littlegreenviper.com/a-quick-introduction-to-the-swi... (Blog entry for [2])
Simon Willison's annotated presentations are the GOAT: slides followed by the transcript of your talk for each slide
https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/6/annotated-presentations...
I wish Maciej gave more talks, they are always very well prepared and entertaining:
https://idlewords.com/talks/
Yeah, I think this sort of thing is a much better format than a slide deck, even if there’s a load of speaker notes you could read.
As much as Simon’s blog is generally good to stay up to date on LLM’s this is not a good way to do a presentation at all.
We shouldn’t conflate expertise from one field with ability in another.
I think you may have misunderstood what an "annotated presentation" is.
It's not a new way of giving presentations. It's a way of publishing your presentations after you have given them where you turn the slides into a longer form written piece.
So it can't be "not a good way to do a presentation at all", because I give presentations exactly the same as everyone else does! Slides with images and a few words.
What's different is that I take the time to write them up properly afterwards.
Here's my most recent example - in this case it wasn't a whole presentation, just the slide portion from a three hour workshop: https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/15/building-on-llms/#llm-...
Bunch more examples here: https://simonwillison.net/tags/annotated-talks/
What's appropriate amount of information in the slides depends on the nature of the presentation.
For short focused presentations (<10 min) minimal slides are the best if the verbal presentation is strong. For longer and more complicated ones more detailed slides are better for the audience. Audience will get distracted or misdirected at times, and making a clear and well flowing enough speech for more detailed and longer presentations is extremely hard.
I think of the (imo legendary) presentation Jobs gave when introducing the iPhone. A brand new product with features and usage patterns that most people never saw before in a mobile device.
It had very little of those highly detailed bullet point slides, but you didn’t feel like after watching that presentation you didn’t “get it”.
That’s the barometer I think about when it comes to presentations
OK, fine, when I'm introducing a new cell phone model to the public, I'll do it Jobs's way. But that's not optimal for an in-depth technical presentation with actual content behind it. It will annoy the present audience and frustrate future readers.
The idea that one presentation style fits every audience, every product, every scenario is just weird. Nothing else on the planet works that way, so why should slide decks?
Completely agree. Ironically, by focusing on Jobs' presentations, people are admiring the type of presentation that they will probably never do, and they do not consider that it probably cost 100s of man-hours to prepare it. I think it is more important to develop more practical skills to communicate effectively whatever you need, while not spending too much time on the deck preparation.
I’m talking about the delivery. It’s not a lot of fluff, relies more on visuals / demos / examples than bullet points and is information dense and perhaps most importantly it’s well paced.
In my opinion this works well for technical presentations. I’ve given more than a few talks following the style and I’ve always been told it’s good stage presence and I’ve gotten a lot of compliments from the audience
In-depth technical presentations were identified as a contributing factor to the Challenge crash. That's why Amazon's meetings have memos.
https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd...
I started thinking of those presentations as a joint reading sessions.
I got around this by keeping the slides simple but dumping all the supplementary information, including most/all of the presentation content, into the notes section of each slide.
That way if I sent people the deck they'd still have all the content.
It's a while since I put anything on Slideshare, and I think it now does include notes, but it used to annoy me that back in the day it didn't.
I fight to record any presentations I do as often as possible. When I am asked for the slides I send the full recording instead as the way to manage this exact issue.
Few things are as frustrating as finding slides from what seems to be an insightful talk strongly pertaining to what you are working on, but no recording of that talk to watch.
I applaud the effort to record such talks, especially in the current age where you know few people will actually watch it and appreciate your effort (but some big LLM provider will certainly lift it as part of a mass scrape and charge a few bucks for access to your findings without crediting you).
What do you expect people to do with that? Spend another hour rewatching the thing? Push it into some AI summary tool?
If information is important enough to bother someone asking for a copy of it, but not important enough to spend an hour ingesting, I'm not sure what to tell you.
The thing is: When working with the material afterwards the important part are the small details. The talk/recording are good for the high level overview and following along on the big picture, but for details it is annoying as one has to jump around for specific words and phrases. Something written or an image/diagram is a lot better to study in depth.
And there lies the trouble with slides: During a talk they should support what is being said, but they are often abused as also being the handout for afterwards.
It sounds like you want detailed documentation. That’s fine, but that’s not what a talk is. A good talk isn’t a reference. And good documentation isn’t an engaging talk.
If people want that, produce two artifacts. Don’t try shoehorn a talk into being documentation. That’s just a recipe for bad work.
It depends on what the talk is about. Of course Steve Jobs' of cited iPhone introduction didn't have any details for in depth research later on, but was a high level product introduction.
A technical talk however explains a concept, a tool or something and thus contains technical information to follow up with, but for that I need the words, the phrases stated so I even know what to look for in the manual. And probably I want to follow it in the order they presented it (I hope they thought about the order they presented it in!) however the manual is ordered more in a reference order.
So yeah, if you do a high level marketing talk it doesn't matter, but then I also won't spend the time on watching a second time. If it has technical depth, then being able to follow the depth is good.
I have dealt with this issue as well before. If folks need something more in depth I will use a LLM + some massaging of my own to create a supporting document. Here is an example of a very disorganized conversation and the supporting document I made with it: https://www.danielvanzant.com/p/what-does-the-structure-of-l... It has clear definitions of the key terms. Timestamps for the important moments, and links to external resources to learn more about any of the topics.
Slides should just have relative links to supporting content online that is accessible on same website/domain and can be downloaded as a single zip.
It is not that complicated really, no need to reinvent the wheel.
I've been in this situation. I'll spend the hour watching the info, but I'll dislike the inefficiency. I consider it impolite.
Not a complete mitigation, but VLC et al plays back at 1.5X+. Highly recommended.
Lots of things fall into this category. Speech is very low information density per time.
Thankfully speech recognition and AI summary is a thing now.
This type of phrasing is strange to me. I guess it depends on what you consider to be, and not to be, “information”.
Reading a bullet point summary of Moby Dick certainly would compress the time required to understand the plot.
Isn’t the prose or phrasing part of the transmission?
For most talks, I would say no. If I were going to a lecture by Pynchon (ha!) I would want to listen at 1x. For 99% of talks at conferences which are mostly just a way of communicating technical data, a text transcription that is then reduced in word count by 50% is probably only a very small loss (if that), and a 90%+ time savings.
This gives me an idea for a website. All of the talks of a conference, audio transcribed and LLM summarized into 3-minute reads.
It might be worth doing the whole INFOCON archive…
Information should be indexed https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/
Wait. I'm unclear what your point is.
Is it that asking for a copy is an unreasonable burden that should require a significant time investment from me?
I've sent many copies of many things I made in my live. It's not so bad. And it's easily shared with many people at once.
Or is it that people can't ingest any meaningful information in less than an hour?
That's clearly not true either. A five minute article can contain extremely valuable insights. A 30 second conversation even more so.
The slices of a good presentation are worthless without the presentation itself. If the deck is valuable in and of itself, it could have just been an email or word doc in the first place.
Well, it's not the reality of most slides I've seen. Most of them seem to be a pretty good summary of the talk. Weirdly, some of them contain more information than the talk.
I do believe most presentations I've seen could've been an email or an article. So I guess I agree with you?
> I do believe most presentations I've seen could've been an email or an article. So I guess I agree with you?
Yeah, I really should have said that in my original post. Most presentations could have been a one pager, and any presentation worth sitting through the slides aren't worth having.
My company records all presentations: it’s like sharing the slides, but better, since we just have the entire presentation again.
Always recording is a good practice I think. It's so cheap with video conferencing that you might as well. Even if nobody uses it later, it didn't cost much. And if you get that one presentation that provides stellar value it's a gift that keeps on giving.
I don't really agree that a recording is always better than the slides. Slides are a text medium, and as such can be searched. You can also go through them much, much faster than through a recording (even if you can listen at 2x). If you're just looking for something specific, slides can be much better.
And sometimes you need to get the whole experience. And then the recording is much better.
Yes, why not? Those who missed the real thing can watch it sped up and skip parts, saving time.
Yeah, recordings are fine for those who missed it. And with video conferencing recording is so easy that you might as well do it, living the motto "better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it".
But when someone specifically asks for slides, it just feels like a dick move to say "you don't want the slides, rewatch the whole presentation instead".
Sometimes you're just looking for the link on slide 45, the pithy problem description on slide 5, or, y'know, you just want to quickly go through the main points again.
Why would I want to listen or watch a presentation (even sped up), when I can read a transcript many times faster, can scan through for the bits that are most relevant, and can quickly jump back to review something if I want to?
It's only when you read the transcript of pretty much any presentation or podcast that you realise how superficial most are and how low the information density actually is.
> Spend another hour rewatching the thing?
Yes?
There exists a slider at the bottom of most videos you can click and drag to your prefered location /s
A video of the presentation is pretty much always better than just the slides. Even if you got the slides you'd have to click through them to find the one you were looking for. Your argument could just as easily be phrased:
"What do you expect people to do with that? Click through and read every slide?"
And it would make about as much sense as the original argument (none).
> Your argument could just as easily be phrased: "What do you expect people to do with that? Click through and read every slide?"
I've had considerable practice at reading. Learned it at a young age, and I got to be pretty good at it over the years. I can get through a slide deck much faster reading it than watching a presentation.
Thank you for pointing out that watching the presentation and clicking through the slides takes you just as long. I assumed most people were at my level of reading speed. It must've been hard coming forward like that. I'm sorry I made you go through that. In the future I will check my privilege.
I've experienced the same thing. I work with ad agencies, and it's common for my client to then turn around and present the same information to their clients, so they'll ask me to put every last word on the slide. It hurts my soul.
I call it two kinds of slides: presentation slides and reading slides. The latter type probably should be a different type of document, but they are wildly popular.
And since you're often expected to hand over the slides afterwards, I try to find a middle ground. The slide will have more than 5 words, but hopefully not too many. Pictures/graphs help with this.
One thing I like to do is interleave these two kinds of slides one by one. Put your visual on one slide, and longer-text bullet points on the next.
Then while presenting the visual you have the bullets of the next slide in your presenter's view, and you can just skip that slide during the presentation. Then, when people ask for the slides they will indeed get all they want.
Reminded me of this which is a MIT lecture called “how to speak”
https://youtu.be/Unzc731iCUY?si=8avRVtQ9blfD43Pf
Best advice on this I've encountered: use speaker notes, and optionally distribute them as a printed handout or separate digital artifact.
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.
I always direct people to Beamer's (latex extension to make presentation decks) doc for their guide on presentation. https://texlive.mycozy.space/macros/latex/contrib/beamer/doc... (Getting Started > Guidelines for Creating Presentations)
Some excerpts:
This is good advice for boring talks, and the kinds of people who make them.
Imagine the same advice being given to standup comedians: “Bits should be a medium size, not too long.” “Avoid long words and try not to alienate your audience”. What a snooze fest!
A good talk is a performance piece. It should be simultaneously entertaining and informative. You do that by using narrative, by connecting with the audience, and by being compelling (via emotion and showing your own pleasure to the audience). If the audience is so busy reading your slides that they don’t pay attention to you, you’ve failed as a speaker.
I’m going to take a big risk here. I challenge you to go watch any great talk online, in just about any field. Watch Steve jobs introduce the iPhone. Watch a standup comedian. Watch a tech demo. Or your favourite conference speech. Or any popular YouTuber. They will almost never be this kind of talk, with subheadings and the appropriate amount of “supportive graphics”.
These “rules” are well meaning, but mediocre. They might even be helpful for a lot of people. But you should aspire higher. Aim to give a great talk. Not just a talk that’s slightly less horrible than your peers.
I couldn't agree more. These "rules" are to help people avoid really really bad presentations. They shouldn't be viewed as an official way of making good presentations.
The "say what you're going to say, say it and then say what you said" rule is probably the worst offender here. It's meant to stop people missing out important context but very often it just leads to boring repetition.
Funny you should mention stand-up comedians because the best presentation advice I ever got came from a workshop my company arranged that was given by a standup comedian. His main message was to follow the "hero's tale" format, which you'd think doesn't apply to tech presentations, but you'd be surprised how often it actually does.
I used to do technical sales and I couldn't agree more. Everyone wants to be part of a compelling story.
> * Ideally, a table of contents should be understandable by itself. In particular, it should be comprehensible before someone has heard your talk.
The typical agenda slide often is more than useless in my opinion.
There are cases where it is good - if you have a recording and discuss individual topics and thus can jump around (but then have time marks as well and jump options in the player), but 99% of agendas are useless and speakers waste a lot of time on them (1. Introduce the speaker 2. Introduce the problem 3. Show old solutions 4. Show the new solution 5. Summary)
Hear, hear!
A ToC slide should typically be avoided -- especially if you only show it once.
Advice I heard but don't know the source of: audiences tend to have a "stack" of about 7 items, possibly less. Only put stuff on the stack you are going to use.
A linear story fits well with this advice. A ToC breaks linearity and tries to push all of its items onto the stack, without any payoff. Within 2 slides, the audience has forgotten your ToC slide, since there's no point to keeping it on the stack. Best case, there's some minor payoff -- but almost never worth the cost of saturating the stack. Most often, it is an unnecessary crutch. So unless it is mandatory (could be for students), just make your presentation's narrative flow logically instead.
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."
You need two versions, the detailed one to share afterward and a stripped back one that you talk to.
I use the “notes” section for more detailed content. Doesn’t help if I have to share physical copies of the deck, but works fine if I pass along the whole file.
the what copies? where? no, when? are you regularly giving talks in the 90s? are you the one messing with the timeline!!?
I like to do this, and have done so for our pitch deck as well, where I've got the "presentation" deck which I can run through in 1-5 minutes, vs the "shareable" deck with way too much info per slide.
Having a separate presentation deck also allows for stories and visuals (eg personal photos) that I never include in the shared deck.
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.
Well yeah, you have to put the new cover sheet on your TPS report.
> constantly management approaches me telling me to use the corporate template, stick to the template, use the template elements, etc.
It sounds like the best policy is to carry on ignoring them.
The best presentation ever was at the time consoles pricing was around 350 and there was no console like the Playstation One and the Sony representative said: 299 and walks away, it does not matter the powerpoint software used, why a product is revolutionary is what matters. I don't care who was the Sony presenter.
I have been doing white text on black slides for close to 15 years now.
Totally agree with you when I have to use the template.
...and it gets worse: this type of presentation is easily 10x more work to prepare, practice & deliver, and totally under-appreciated by the promoters of reading a wall of text. I went to business school, so basically have a Bachelor's of Power Point, and my tolerance for shity slide decks is close to zero.
> They just don’t get it. What comprises a good presentation.
I take it one could argue between what's a presentation and a talk but to me one of the very best presentation I've seen is Rich Hickey presenting Clojure.
Then there's "Simple made easy" considered by many to be one of the greatest ever:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4
There are many bullet points: but he'll go through each them and only show the next bullet point once he's done with the previous one. He even kids about a made up graph on one of the slide.
I think that what makes a good presentation depends a lot on what's being presented.
> Tangential: I am the only one using a MacBook in a company of 700+ coworkers
It's not tangential. It speaks about what kind of a company it is.
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.
> The world should have learned what a great presentation is and what presentation software should be like.
The underlying difference can not be fixed by software, because software can't make you care about or value things: Jobs saw presentations as performances.
I don't mean that in a dismissive way, I mean that Jobs treated presentations as plays and musicals. Few people are willing (let alone able) to block out days in order to rehearse and fine tune a presentation. Even less so days of multiple people in order to get feedback and suggestions. In real world settings.
Even just rehearsing twice - once to yourself, perhaps in front of a camera to watch back and check timings, and once in front of a spouse or coworker - puts you ahead of 99% of corporate presenters.
And it shows. Even at large events half the presenters appear to have never even seen the deck before and revert to Storytime with CEO as they read the slides to you.
> Even at large events half the presenters appear to have never even seen the deck before
In my experience in academia, most of them wrote the slides just before going up to present
In fact it seems to be almost a badge of honour for the older professors. They pride themselves on giving lazy and unprepared talks. Why? Because it shows that they have earned not having to care anymore, they are powerful enough now that they don't have to perform
I often finish the slides right before going up to present. They're mostly there as a visual flourish rather than the main content of my talk.
Also the slide deck is often dual purpose. Often it's an OK presentation, and an OK document for people who need you to break it into paragraphs and explain each paragraph.
Yes, Tufte hated this, because presentations should be presentations, and people should read the accompanying technical report.
Tufte is 83 and still alive. (Had to check because of parent comment.)
Maybe he hated it but still hates it too.
And graphics designers.
Maybe I should rehearse, spend more money (normally out of my own pocket as I don't have access to a graphics staff), and otherwise prepare more for a conference presentation, which may be 50 people or fewer. But that's probably not realistic. I think I do a decent job in general. I could probably do better. But everything is a tradeoff.
Maybe controversial opinion, I'm not sure most people can learn much useful from Steve Jobs, and trying to emulate his presentations.
He had a huge support team to help him polish, and was very skilled. It feels like someone who has never driven a car trying to learn by watching Formula 1. Yes their drivers are amazing at drivers, but you can't really complain when your delivery drivers can't hit F1 speeds.
Agreed. I also think too many people are trying to emulate his exact style, mostly to their detriment even though Jobs honed the craft for decades.
If you've been to SaaS product conferences, they are ALL doing the Steve Jobs thing of presenting slide decks that are basically advertisements of new features. All fluff and stock images, very little substance. The implementation details and all their asterisks are provided by your account manager/sales engineer.
Try doing that when presenting a proposal or project results to senior leadership at your company, and see how quickly you get placed into PIP.
Step 0 of a presentation is: know your audience.
Doing a sales pitch to C suite person on your hobby horse is likely to get in as much trouble as doing a technical deep dive into the same topic to the same person.
> The implementation details and all their asterisks are provided by your account manager/sales engineer.
That's because the purpose of the presentation is to get you to talk to your account manager.
Having worked on presentation software, it's more complicated than what it looks like in its surface.
First, considering the base/generic case, you can't really beat Powerpoint, Keynote and Google Slides, they are somewhat free/included in basic accounts, they will get the job done, people are used to Powerpoint, and it's not the core product of any of these companies, there's very little incentive for them to improve that.
Second, because you can't compete on base case, a company needs to target those who will willingly pay for presentation software, that's sales and marketing, they don't care about beautiful software, they care about conversion and data.
And lastly, most presentations are bland, the more you invest in a great creation and editing experience, the more complicated it gets and makes it less likely that people who just want to create basic presentations actually do it, doesn't matter if you have tutorials or templates, they will make crappy presentations to get the job done, if they try to do add a little touch to it they will likely overuse animations or similar features and make it even crappier.
In the end there are very few people who put effort into creating actual presentation decks, the actual content being presented is far more important or a presentation is often a hurdle to get over with, such as doing internal presentations or presenting your school assignments.
Even in conferences you still get really bad presentations, the better ones are mostly remembered not because of the quality of the slides, but the contents and the skills of the presenter.
It's really too bad nobody has been able to step into the role Steve had for the industry. We lack the ability to effectivly communicate what's new and exciting to people and it's effecting the moral across the board.
Now it's hypemen with teams of engineers pushing their solutions more and more.
I'm not saying Steve didn't contribute to hype, but somehow he made it feel natural and welcome.
There is a niche that is left empty for Jobs' style of presentation.
> We lack the ability to effectivly communicate what's new and exciting to people and it's effecting the moral across the board.
I have a harder time with this.
The last presentation that stuck with me is Framework's 12 inch laptop [0]. It's absolutely not polished, the camera shakes, I don't know if they even rehearsed it or made multiple takes. And they seem to be conscious enough to have publicly asked for video producers to contact them to make better videos.
But that presentation gets to the viewer everything it needs to, it's clear, well explained, succinct, and makes you want to go buy it now if the product is for you.
I don't want the second coming of Steve Jobs with graphs with no Y axis or reality distortion fields. I want companies confident enough that their products can mostly speak for themselves and only need simple and straight explanations.
[0] https://youtu.be/Ejl-7X74tgc
> It's absolutely not polished, the camera shakes, I don't know if they even rehearsed it or made multiple takes. And they seem to be conscious enough to have publicly asked for video producers to contact them to make better videos.
One of the things that is clear from watching that video (which is great by the way), is that they tell this story day in day out. They know their story, and they know their audience wants to see the detail they're sharing. Posting the M1 Macbook reveal [0] isn't going to turn the head of someone who wants replacable RAM in their laptop, but having someone take it apart on their desk is.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_K2YUe1PN4
There is this thing about presentations: the more people on the audience, the smaller your message must be.
People really don't understand that point.
He did present things as revolutionary that already shipped months ago elsewhere, and this was irritating at times. But. This is exactly the point that so many other companies/brands missed. Serve your usebase, make the product revolutionary with as boring tech as possible.
Yes of course Apple, a fantastically capital-strong enterprise did spend a lot on tech R&D, but they usually did their own non-standard thing. (Vertical integration, the consequence of narrow focus, later the advantage of product/brand differentiation.) Of course, again, all possible due to the wildly successful Mac/MacBooks.
> He did present things as revolutionary that already shipped months ago elsewhere, and this was irritating at times.
He knew that who did it first didn’t matter as much as the first one to do it right. New technology can’t be revolutionary if the products it’s sold in flop or never escape their tiny niche, no matter how cool it is.
Mac and MacBooks were not wildly successful back then. iPods were, though. I can’t find a graph for 2000s, but Apple desktop and computers started being used more after iPhone came out (and after MacBook Air came out).
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...
I thought iMacs preceeded iPods, but my memory may be failing me... The iMac was the original rebirth of the flagging Mac image...
They did, I am just disputing the notion that they were “wildly” successful.
iPod and iPhones I would describe as wildly successful. Even AirPods. Even iPads. They were THE device to get in that market segment, and if you looked around lots of people had them. The M processor MacBooks are also wildly successful. But I don’t remember the iMacs being like that in early 2000s.
... right, I meant to say "loads of cash because of very nice profit margins and lots of units sold"
https://lowendmac.com/ed/fox/11ff/apple-decade.html
https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/8817.jpeg
> He did present things as revolutionary that already shipped months ago elsewhere, and this was irritating at times.
It was irritating to a specific brand of nerd who valued "doing it first" over "doing it right". They were a fascinating sideshow back then, if not a little irritating themselves. To see someone write this in 2025 is like learning about the Japanese holdouts after World War II.
I still think they are not doing things right. (Their UI continues to look and feel crazy. Hardware is amazing, software is made for a circus show. Just give some simple task that involves Finder, or any settings on any of their device.)
But it was way more snappier than the median Android device, and usually looked more consistent too.
Thats a good observation. Never thought about this but nobody recent comes to mind. These days everything feels pushed on us. Like we are just a role in their agenda of ushering the world into VR experiences for example. Steve had a way of delivering what we were waiting for and truly wanted. That probably helped the presentation of it all
It did help that Steve was alive during the personal computing revolution. He was a big part in shaping it but it was also just a good time to be in his position.
There's not been the same kind of thing for a while. His death came as personal computers had managed their way fully into our pockets.
Now there are new technologies, but nothing I think we all agree is as ubiquitous as the PC. Even AI is hard to sell because unlike the word processor or the portable music device, AI isn't always functional, and so it doesn't feel as much like a complete solution.
Technology is suffering more and more from itself lately, and I really hope a leader will emerge and help us take an honest look at ourselves and what we accept in terms of usability. No more cookie warnings pretending they solve privacy issues, but complete overhauling of contracts and agreements between technology companies and users, just as an example.
It used to be everyone was normal and to become a billionaire you had to sell a product to a bunch of people. Now there are already billionaires, everyone's already indebted to several, and they basically compete with each other for market share.
And they barely compete with each other. They mostly stay out of each other’s business or share markets growing so big its effectively competitionless
He made the ordinary become extraordinary. He didn't promise shit that never shipped; he made people that excited about what Apple actually shipped.
That's a huge difference from what Silicon Valley has done since while trying to mirror his image
And now we get Apple Intelligence.
And Siri, which is frankly farcical, and cannot handle the simplest of requests, after how many years?
> The world should have learned what a great presentation is and what presentation software should be like.
Could be that presenters that have some mojo are a small minority, a niche. Really, almost nobody on the world cares about presentations.
I am curious what is so different about Keynote? I tried using it once for a few minutes in a computer lab years ago and while I remember some of the ways of doing things were different, I don't remember it being different. I was never that impressed with the quality of Steve Jobs' slides so maybe I'm missing something.
> The world should have learned what a great presentation is and what presentation software should be like
Bullshit. His style of presentation was suited for a very specific kind of communication that Apple marketing is now known for.
Slides are used in a far wider range of settings -- from classrooms to boardrooms -- where the effect of the Apple style would range between ineffective and detrimental.
I'm willing to bet Steve Jobs would have flayed the presenter if they had tried to present some internal technical presentation at Apple in that kind of style.
Let's not elevate form over function. Not all human communication is about tickling the cave brain and getting someone to buy a product.
It was hard work, tons of rehearsals and many writers that formed these presentations.
It’s not a concept that you can just adhere to and your ugly disorganized presentation becomes beautiful and engaging.
Nowadays I export my presentations as PDFs.
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.
https://ia.net/presenter
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.
I've also heard good things about marp [0], and it gets bonus points for being FOSS
0: https://marp.app/
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.
"IA" sounds like the name of an ironically backwards company trying not to get VC funding in the current year.
Another reason why cloud first is cancer.
Every software:
* Should operate offline
* Should export and work with locally saved (preferably) human readable format
It's really too bad things like Electron aren't better, because making cross platform applications is kind of daunting and so a lot of places just put it on the web.
Is it? Then how do calibre, VLC, GIMP, LibreOffice,… manage to do it? And these have much more complicated interface than most electron apps.
With an enormous amount of unpaid labor.
Libraries like PyQt (which Calibre uses, for instance) make it feasible at all. They still won't save you the moment you encounter any platform-specific corner case, of which there are uncountable multitudes.
Tip your OSS projects. They earned it more than you know.
I think it's still less than the amount of effort the VS Code team has put in trying to make Electron work. The guys (I believe only two) at Sublime HQ have managed to create a cross platform UI that is efficient and works well.
Kinda depends if you want to find developers willing and able to reinvent a lot of things or not. If you can justify rebuilding a textbox or scrollbar (for example) then perhaps you can roll your own solution. Otherwise you look for libraries.
The web is rich with 3rd party support for a lot of things, so as a platform it's attractive. If you need to grow, you can be more confident it will have what you need. But with that also comes a lot of bloat, legacy and poor decisions too.
> Libraries like PyQt (which Calibre uses, for instance) make it feasible at all.
Writing Qt in C++ or using QtQuick is really not that bad
Wasn't gimp patching a compiled executable because nobody on the team had a Mac at one point?
Uglier ones too
Are you looking for something to look at or something to use?
Both. I have to look at a GUI to use it.
Sometimes eye candy actually helps usability. There was a time when I would have argued Apple did this best, but lately I feel less this way. Still, look at apps like Zed. Beauty in its simplicity. That's worth a lot.
What frameworks like Qt often suffer from is an outdated or overly restrictive design language which is harder than worthwhile to customize, so you get apps that feel antiquated. Some people aren't as bothered by this as others, and generally I agree it shouldn't matter, but it does.
"Eye candy" also helps prevent the uncanny valley effect, but for ux.
On Mac OS, I can almost immediately tell when something is a QT app. It can be a beautifully well designed app, and my hindbrain is just screaming that it's not right. Take QGIS. Looks good, works well. But doesn't feel like a Mac app.
And it's not even about following all the Mac conventions. Sure, I like the Mac style preference panes OmniGraffle and Transmit have. But the telegram Mac client, written in swift, has it's own weird preference system, and still feels "right"
Electron apps, ironically, don't trigger the uncanny valley effect. Maybe it's because they all bring their own UX, instead of trying to ape platform ux, maybe it's because the font and other rendering is more polished, by virtue of being browser descended, but either way, they don't make me feel like I'm interacting with some weird not-quite Mac program.
> Sometimes eye candy actually helps usability.
I strongly doubt so. Eye candy becomes quickly old when you're using the software for hours a day.
Not all software is used hours a day. Some software needs to be intuitive so the user doesn’t need to invest hours to learn it. And visuals play a huge part in that.
> Some software needs to be intuitive so the user doesn’t need to invest hours to learn it.
Consistency helps more than aesthetics at this point. Shared metaphors and all that.
They probably use something like Qt, which is probably what a lot more apps should use. But when you have a workforce that knows React, you build webapps.
Qt’s licensing makes adoption harder than it needs to be.
gimp sucks dude, vlc is just ffmpeg wrapper
Technology choice is orthogonal to what I've said.
I agree it's separate, though I offer an explanation for why we see more and more apps which should be offline-first developed online.
The reason everything is SaaS and Cloud-based apps isn't technical, it's commercial. You have much more control online than offline, that's the number one reason. Everything else is so distant that you can ignore it for most intents and purposes.
That is not a problem for offline-first as we have service workers and PWAs for that.
Figma’s core product works fine offline. The Slides product was supposed to work fine offline. It just didn’t because it was completely broken.
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And there should be no money at all! From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. /s
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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.
At one time, I had some accessories so that I could present from my phone if needed. I think I may even have used it once. But, yes, be prepared both in terms of gear and mentally for glitches. E.g. if your clicker isn't working be ready to smoothly transition to telling the AV team next slide or walking up to your laptop as appropriate.
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.
If you are presenting over zoom, you ideally want to put your full screen presentation on one screen (which is shared), and put the zoom screen on the other. So you know who is talking. Maybe look at chat.
Keynote, on a dual monitor setup, will takeover both screens, and will not allow something like the above. No options to disable dual screen usage. 5 years post-pandemic, after millions of presentations given over zoom, probably thousands given by Apple's own engineers, this is still not fixed.
Even if I make a presentation in keynote, I export to PDF.
And if monitor space is a premium or you don't have a second one you can use something like Deskpad (https://github.com/Stengo/DeskPad) to create a virtual one a window. This is also practical if you want to have the speaker view up.
Pretty sure Keynote will let you run the presentation in a window which you can full screen
Just present within the window, you’ll need to enable that option.
I’m a Mac developer and when asked always say that my favorite app of all time is Keynote. It’s just so, so well done, and the epitome of a great Mac app. Would that all software had so much care for UX put into it.
I mean it's nice and all but it takes me forever to make presentations in it
Figma has so many things on the go (Sites, Make, etc), I doubt Slides is going to get the investment and TLC it needs.
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.
> 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.
What the article describes about Slides, last year’s big new Figma feature, doesn’t inspire confidence in the half-dozen new features from this year.
Yeah.
Figma itself is great.
Figjam (digital whiteboarding, sticky notes) is okay, but one might move over to Miro or any other and it wouldn’t really matter which tool you use.
Everything else is a distraction. Devs don’t want or need dev mode. Slides doesn’t make any sense, figma and figjam work just fine for presentation.
The AI tools are really bad (asking for layouts and stuff using AI in figjam is just broken)
Slides was literally made because they realised customers were using figma for presentations.
Being a tool native with the story teller is probably better. Heavily rehearsed presentations are dumb anyway inside a company, we’re not doing PR, there’s no black turtleneck here.
The best presentations at every level are a conversation between the presenter (trying to inform or spur a decision to be made) and the audience.
I really wished they had gone more the way of Linear - focus on doing a few things really well.
> Heavily rehearsed presentations are dumb anyway inside a company, we’re not doing PR, there’s no black turtleneck here.
At some size, it becomes needed.
For the average employee it will come a time they need to convince higher ups of doing something they don't have any plans to do.
For managers/VPs they'll need to get people onboard for controversial and widely impacting changes.
Rehearsal and a well prepared and presentable message will be needed if you want to put the odds on your side.
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.
That sounds like a good, easy to spot indicator that these people do not care about quality. :)
maybe they're right not to though. we're in an era of capitalism where C+ quality maximizes profit efficiency
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.
In my opinion, it's a matter of mental framework. Presentations are not meant for a reader, they're meant for an audience, and if you try to make them readable, self contained, you're bound to fail. Presentations work best, or only, really, if they accompany a presenter, not the other way around.
For a lot of routine internal corporate stuff, they sort of need to do double duty and the presenter needs to just skip over reading a lot of the fine print. Even if they want to spend the time to create a separate document, most people won't read it.
For a conference presentation, I may create speaker notes or include a link to background material but basically I feel no requirement to try to put everything I may talk about on the page.
My take PowerPoint slides in private industry is that they are mostly analogous to what academics use poster presentations for.
They are narrated to small audiences of 1-10 (maybe 20) people at a time, who might want some notes to read before or share around.
IMO like posters they make for terrible presentations to very large groups and I kept questioning the design and purpose, but it seems to work for certain situations.
I might raise the number a bit (though most of the audience will be tuned out anyway) but absolutely. "Here's our plan for the Kumquat initiative." There are some high level points and a bunch of supporting data and detail which many people these days are used to reading in presentation format.
But I'd never give a presentation like that at a conference.
Yes totally - internal presentations are like that.
I meant external facing, “preparing a (slide) pack for a client” kind of deal.
Client deck is tricky. In my prior stint as an IT industry analyst, I think we usually prepared a report of some sort if we weren't presenting. On the other hand, the client might prefer essentially a slide deck for internal purposes. Probably ask them what they want.
Presentation documents can never do double duty. They will always fail at least one of the goals, and if you insist on not optimizing for one, they will fail both.
Most routing corporate stuff is just people booking the time for denying others the excuse to say they didn't know about it because of time constraints. Those people don't care if the presentation fails to communicate anything (what it almost always does).
Most routine corporate stuff is basically a document in presentation form which a lot of people seem to prefer these days. Yes, you may give a 30 minute "presentation" using the "slides" but it's not really a presentation which I think is fine. I don't really disagree with your basic point. The sort of thing presented at larger team meetings I attended latterly tended to FYI sort of stuff, some of which was vaguely useful to know and some of which wasn't.
Yeah for sure. Reminds me of people who use LaTeX for their talks and inevitably fill them with equations. It’s just not what slides are for
(Though I’d admit that LaTeX is good for lectures with lots of maths)
Ghaff’s comment already mentioned it but in my current use case (corporate) slides are very much supposed to be self contained. When I was a student I had no issues making pretty slides, but (fortunately?) almost never needed to have more than just some text and pictures in any slide.
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.
I've been drag-dropping pdf figures into slides since Keynote first came out. For charts it was such a relief from the crappy pixelated stuff that you still need to use for Powerpoint.
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
> 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
Invert this for developers, and now you know why people do it. There simply are very few better cross-platform UI tools and compliers. If you want the same fidelity everywhere, you pretty much have to rewrite it everywhere.
We’ll labor under web until users are so unhappy with it that the business financial benefit of “write once, run everywhere with a team of less specialized, cheaper engineers” is negated by users leaving the platform. But since users broadly don’t care, and it’s a lot cheaper & faster, we’ll keep using web. So it’s just so accessible, that more people will try to use your project in the web as opposed to an app.
End user experience is not what drives technical decisions in tech; money does.
Anyways, it’s not like apps are dead simple to get right either. It’s still very easy for a team to write a shitty native app. And if you’re writing N apps for N operating systems, without N teams of experienced developers, odds are at least one of those apps will suck. Similarly, a team of experts on the web, given the time & incentive to care about performance, can make incredibly performant web apps. (Not caring about performance and optimizing the experience is a problem with what companies prioritize financially, not with what developers care about.)
Mhmm not sure I'd agree that webapps have more edge cases than say, Jetpack compose (especially the PC version), or QML. Plus a huge advantage of web based stuff is that the edge cases are usually a lot more documented.
I say this as someone who has mostly used Qt+QML for some newer projects and came to regret it, in huge part due to a big lack of components, libraries etc. And very little documentation, or examples, outside of the official documentation.
Also, at my day job, they used to make all of their UI using Windows GUI frameworks (we sell very expensive testing devices mostly for industrial customers). It led to a big problem down the line, since we were stuck with using Windows, meaning that when we started shipping even smaller devices, it became a huge mess. In fact most of the devs are very glad that we moved to web based UIs since we don't have to rewrite everything for every single platform. I know, it's a tired point that everyone repeats but it is very very helpful especially for smaller dev teams. And even for our bigger teams, it made it easier to get a consistent and tested front end.
Sure, you can be multiplatform without using web, but you still end up with tons of edge cases and you still have to write a web version if you want your app to be accessible on the web too.
Figma wouldn't have been successful if it wasn't so easily accessible-through the web.
> Will we always labor under this "it must be a web app" burden?
Figma (the base app) actually works great and has for many years. It does not have these problems.
Figma Slides is a new feature they’re pushing. It has these issues because it appears to be unfinished and not well tested.
Everyone reaching to blame cross-platform or web technologies is missing the point. Figma can and does ship great apps within this framework. There’s something strange going on within Figma where the slides product is being neglected.
Interesting. I'm in a current development arc that includes some designers that LOVE Figma. They want me to love Figma. It's not bad, I don't hate it. But I don't love it. Oh... and I use the desktop app version. Because it works better.
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.
I do my slides in LaTeX because I can describe my figures as a program so I don't need to redraw things to make minute adjustments.
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.
I make slides directly in the Figma design tool and post images of them into Google Slides. Figma Slides seems to just make everything harder than the default tool.
Every piece of presentation software will eventually flake out on you, I learned long ago that there should always be a plan B. I just make it a habit to always export my presentation as a PDF or PNGs so in the worst case, I can just open it up in Preview and flip through slides.
This whole article reads like a promotion for Apples Keynote masked behind a ridiculous concern "to finally upgrade my presentation tool". I'm guessing he didn't mention that Keynote comes with a price tag of the cheapest Mac computer... while the other is completely free.
Other than realtime collab and sync, which could be done in an app with a backing service, is there any reason Figma isn’t an app?
Other than: (1) modern devs don’t know how to build anything other than cloud SaaS, and (2) and most importantly it gives you undefeatable DRM and a subscription model?
DRM protection and Subscription is a powerful motivator: https://x.com/paulg/status/1926227216318296308
Talks are mission critical. I wouldn’t trust anything other than keynote or a pdf, or PowerPoint at a push
Gotta love LaTeX beamer class.
I like experimenting with my tools, but I wouldn't use any slide creation/presentation software that doesn't allow to export a backup PDF version.
$1000000 says figma doesn’t E2E test or UAT their software suites and the bug backlog is mostly abandoned vanity features or things cut for release.
There's a PM from Figma commenting up above that you might now owe $1000000:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44152221
I read about dogfooding and buzz about an internal testing chat channel, but no mention of running e2e suites that cover sanity checks or employing real UAT (I don’t consider “ping us in the bug channel” as UAT process).
Gotta respect the guts it takes to run a 100 people presentation on a tool that’s still finding its footing. Big Balls.
Bullet point driven software development always results in apps with terrible UX. Tale as old as time.
Until someone figures out why Slides are an AI product, there’s no way Figma will care about them.
I use Miro for presentations because I can lean into my ADHD and just zoom into whatever I want
The "Slide Sorter" view in PowerPoint/Keynote/Libre works similarly. High level thumbnail view of your slides, double click to "zoom in" (aka go to the actual slide).
I still use beamer and latex to make my slide decks, and it's yet to steer me wrong
This is in keeping with the overall problem Figma presents to organizations. If you create a place to design software in isolation while eagerly forgetting about real world software concerns, and you bump the seat license cost until only a few can have them, you're going to make early mistakes due to deliberately limited perspective, for which you'll pay later when they're more expensive to correct. Dev mode isn't there to bring in more perspective. It's there to keep the silos separate, for "handoff" rather than really working on it together.
Separately: It doesn't matter whether you downloaded the local app, it's thoroughly a SaaS product, and working offline is the exception to its rule.
I can't stand Figma at all, it always misses the point of the exercise by focusing too much on fancy, pixel perfect design.
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Please do not post LLM comments to HN
I personally stopped using traditional presentation software altogether. These days, I build all my presentations using vibe coding tools. It might not be the fastest way to create a presentation, but it’s definitely the most fun. Plus, for animations, all you need to do is explain what you want, and most of the time, it just works. I even asked for speaker notes, and I had them ready in three prompts. Magic.
If you’re curious, I use Macaly for this (macaly.com).
I personally stopped using traditional methods for contributing to discussions altogether. Today, I just spit out thinly veiled ads using LLMs and it might not contribute to the discussion but at least it gets my product out there. If the OP has nothing do with what I'm advertising, even better.
Post a link to one? Would love to see how they turn out.
Here is my last one https://macaly-presentation.vercel.app/