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.
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.
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.
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.
But I'd never give a presentation like that at a conference.
I meant external facing, “preparing a (slide) pack for a client” kind of deal.
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).
(Though I’d admit that LaTeX is good for lectures with lots of maths)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Yes, Tufte hated this, because presentations should be presentations, and people should read the accompanying technical report.
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.
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
Could be that presenters that have some mojo are a small minority, a niche. Really, almost nobody on the world cares about presentations.
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.
That's a huge difference from what Silicon Valley has done since while trying to mirror his image
And Siri, which is frankly farcical, and cannot handle the simplest of requests, after how many years?
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.
> 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.
People really don't understand that point.
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.
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 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.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...
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.
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.
But it was way more snappier than the median Android device, and usually looked more consistent too.
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.
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.
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.
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 not a concept that you can just adhere to and your ugly disorganized presentation becomes beautiful and engaging.
Every software:
* Should operate offline
* Should export and work with locally saved (preferably) human readable format
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.
I strongly doubt so. Eye candy becomes quickly old when you're using the software for hours a day.
Consistency helps more than aesthetics at this point. Shared metaphors and all that.
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.
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.
Writing Qt in C++ or using QtQuick is really not that bad
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thankfully speech recognition and AI summary is a thing now.
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?
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…
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.
If people want that, produce two artifacts. Don’t try shoehorn a talk into being documentation. That’s just a recipe for bad work.
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.
It is not that complicated really, no need to reinvent the wheel.
Yes?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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])
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.
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
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?
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
https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd...
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.
https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/6/annotated-presentations...
We shouldn’t conflate expertise from one field with ability in another.
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/
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.
Having a separate presentation deck also allows for stories and visuals (eg personal photos) that I never include in the shared deck.
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 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.
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!
Some excerpts:
* 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 themThe 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.
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.
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.
It sounds like the best policy is to carry on ignoring them.
It's not tangential. It speaks about what kind of a company it is.
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."
Totally agree with you when I have to use the template.
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.
- 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.
At least reveal.js is understandable due to its programming focus and automating slide generation with multiple output formats.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
Day of conf, 100x the number of users. Things go boom.
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.
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.
Caring a little bit will help save a bunch of space.
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
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”.
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
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.
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.)
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.
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.
If you’re curious, I use Macaly for this (macaly.com).
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.
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
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.
(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.
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.
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".
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.
lauritz•1d ago
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.
slashdave•14h ago