p/deckset
Create beautiful presentations from Markdown
Justin Jackson
Deckset 2 — Great-looking slides from simple Markdown files in no time
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Write down your thoughts in your favourite text editor, and Deckset will turn them into beautiful presentations. New in 2: Create your own themes.

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Justin Jackson
I am so excited about this one! 🎉 In 2015, at a conference in Barcelona, I watched @rachelandrew effortlessly create slides for her talk in markdown. She was able to modify her presentation on the fly, adding quotes from the speakers who were before her. I asked her what she was using: "Deckset!" she replied. Since then, Deckset has been my secret weapon in preparing every single talk I've given. Writing my talks in markdown makes it easy to create my initial outline -- Deckset takes that markdown and magically turns it into beautiful slides. Now, you can edit and create your own themes for Deckset (something I've wanted for a long time). Congrats on this launch @se!
Sven Ellingen
@mijustin Thanks so much for hunting us, @mijustin, and really glad to hear how you found out about it via @rachelandrew! 🙌
Justin Jackson
@se I feel the same way as @danielbarden in this tweet: "I cannot stress how much @decksetapp helps me to create presentations quickly. I have 2 hours to come up with a presentation for a Brown Bag session about the new tools from Xcode 8 :)"
Justin Jackson

I've been using Deckset since I found out about in 2015. It allows you to effortlessly create presentation slides from markdown text. My secret weapon when preparing for a talk!

Pros:

Magically creates presentation slides from markdown! The best way to prepare for a talk.

Cons:

Not as many options as Powerpoint, but that's what makes it amazing! Deckset forces you to think about your message.

Jamie Lawrence
I'm looking forward to being able to gently customise my slide design… although I still think a lot of power came from _not_ being able to customise /screw up the design.
Sven Ellingen
@ideasasylum We totally hear you on this one and it’s part of the reason it took us so long to come up with a solution that still sticks to Deckset’s original promise of not having to fiddle with design controls endlessly. I think you’ll like it!
Antonio Viggiano
Hey great idea, this seems a wonderful product specially for entrepreneurs I think it would be nice if this was a web app and not a desktop software, since people can't use it on Linux/Windows/Mobile. I also think (from the presentation video and pictures on your website) that it needs more "pre-made templates" so people can save even more time.
Sven Ellingen
@aviggiano Thanks for the feedback. Those are great points. We often times get the feedback that people appreciate the fact that it isn’t a web app because they’d be preparing their slides on the go, while travelling to a conference or in other circumstances where they’re not so sure how reliable their connection will be. Being entirely on the device does give peace of mind to some! :-) But I fully agree that having a web-based part would be great both for cross-platform availability and collaborative features. We’ll see what the future holds! ;-) Regarding more templates: Yes, 100%, we didn’t want to overshadow the launch of customization with a truckload of themes but we’ve still got something up our sleeves…
Eytan Buchman
Powerpoint pixel pushers, meet your salvation. I've been waiting for V2 of Deckset for months. It's literally one of my favorite productivity Jedi tools, given that I write notes in markdown anyways. Deckset takes my Markdown and spits out beautiful, typography-rich presentations that put the focus on the content. Just as an example, two months ago, I was sitting with two people on my team, prepping for a company-wide meeting. I took notes and at the end magically transformed it into a presentation (complete with our company's theme) with the new beta theming. I blew their minds. @se congrats on shipping a hero-maker.
Sven Ellingen
@eytanbuchman 🙌 So glad to hear that and thanks for sharing that story!
Rob Hardy

Deckset has become one of my favorite apps ever. As someone who writes almost entirely in markdown and who makes a ton of presentations, this app just makes so much sense to me, and it speeds up the creation and design process to a pretty insane degree. Can't recommend it highly enough.

Pros:

Now it's both simple AND customizable! I've got so much love for this app.

Cons:

The only con was that you couldn't customize styles in the first version.

garrit schaap

I've been using Deckset for many years now and have participated in the beta for this version, and I totally love it. Thanks to Deckset I can focus on the content of my lecture and don't have to worry about the design. It just always looks good. In the new Version you can now easily change fonts and colors for better readability on this one special beamer ;).

Pros:

I make all my slides with Deckset for the lectures I give at University and this software saved me priceless hours of my life!

Cons:

Not for my use case :)

Esben Hardenberg
I have been using Deckset for years and have always been super happy for using it to create slides for education and talks alike. Super stoked to see v2 launch!
Sven Ellingen
@esbenhardenberg Thanks, really glad to hear that! 🙌
Jonathan Piron
Just amazing! Clean, easy to use, allows to focus on content while still having the ability to customize the design. Endless tweaking on PowerPoint and co? Just forget... Write in plain text, and format with Deckset!
Matteo Cassese

I'm a happy user of the paid version of Deckset. After using Keynote for more time than I can remember, I've opted for the simplicity of using markdown and having bold text rather than fine control over placement of graphical elements that Keynote will provide.

My presentations for the last 12 months have all been done either with Deckset (for the screen) or with Google Slides (for collaboration) with super simple templates. If you look at my Slideshare you can tell that wasn't always the case ;-)) https://www.slideshare.net/matte...

Pros:

Simple, fast, to the point

Cons:

A bit of a learning curve to place images

Lukas

I love the idea and execution!

Pros:

Fun, easy, modern

Cons:

Not all PPT features ... 😆

Fred Terenas

Great job, v2 with massive improvements, good idea to NOT include an editor (there are hundreds!), some issues with Ulysses as an editor, tend ot think is my old 2.7.2 version

Pros:

Fast, easy, focus-on-content presentation design, very easy to update, improve, customize deliveries as only a markdown file needs editing

Cons:

having to "migrate" many ideas/ppts/keynotes to deckset :D

Thameera‏ Senanayaka

I've prepared some presentations with the tool already and loved the experience

Pros:

Build beautiful and minimal slides fast with Markdown

Cons:

Maybe the lack of features, but which is also a good thing - being not bloated and minimal

Joss

I saw a presentation did with Deckset few months ago and found it was very clear with a nice design. When I understood that the design is doing automatically 

by the software and the user has just to edit a markdown file, I was seduced. So I tried it recently and I was surprised by this brilliant software. To create a pretty presentation, we are just to edit a markdown file! That’s crazy but they have more in this version 2. We can now customize our presentation in few clicks … and share the style with other users. The wow effect is real.

Pros:

Easy to use.

Faster to create.

Simple to learn.

Elegant result to show.

Cons:

You must to know how markdown works ?

Rubén Berenguel

Have sparingly used Deckset, not for lack of love but lack of presentations. It's the best tool for a good reason: it does not let you tweak the styles (well, 2.0 does, but for me that's like a BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF EMERGENCY). I started using v1 because of this: focus on the content, pick a theme that looks good (all look good) and present.

Only drawback I have is not being able to export my slides with animated gifs (they get exported with a fixed frame, which is good enough for emergencies): some kind of HTML exported presentation (auto-generated using some simple JS framework?) would work great for this use case.

Pros:

Lets you focus on the slides and not on the design

Cons:

Impossible to export in any format having animated gifs :(

Ashish Dasnurkar

fantastic and minimalistic. great for putting together slides at the last moment ;-)

Pros:

simple to use, create elegant presentations, easy export function

Cons:

none

Jarnleikr Nidhogg
My time is valuable and I don't want to spend it fiddling with all sorts of settings - they are a distraction. With Deckset I get the job done super quickly, I can focus on content, and with version 2.x I can even make my own custom templates. What's not like? :-)
Bernardo Amorim

I've just bought this app to prepare my presentation for Code BEAM SF and I'm amazed of how simple this makes everything.

Don't get me wrong, I really like Keynote and PowerPoint, but there are so much options and it's kind of overwhelming.

Also, one point is that if you want to draw some diagrams, there are actually better tools for the job (even better than PowerPoint or Keynote), so in the end you just have a better tool, because you can just add images you make on a drawing app or photoshop or anything.

Some improvements I'd like to see:

Headers vs Texts

The one thing I'd like to have is the option to customize the header size (I find myself changing between #, ## and ### just to change the look and feel) What I think would be a better approach is to have a consistent header lever hierarchy and then be able to customize the size in each slide. The point with that is that I can focus on content first and worry about the look and feel as the last step (adding highlights to snippets, changing some text sizes and stuff).

Also, the point is that sometimes you just want a nice big message but it's actually not a "heading", so there is some semantic inconsistencies. But tbh, this is just minor improvement.

Snippet highlight steps

Another thing that may be nice is the ability to create build steps (like the one for lists) for snippet highlight. Right now we use the [.highlight: 1, 3-5]. Maybe would be nice to add the option to do something like [.highlight: 1, 3-5; 8-9] to create two slides, the first one with 1, 3, 4 and 5 lines highlighted and the other with 8 and 9 highlighted. That would make it easy to guide people through the code.

Pros:

Blazing fast. Simple. Make amazing presentation without much work.

Cons:

Somewhat "limited", but that is the point.

Bernardo Amorim
Also, maybe having a plugin-system would be great. That would allow the community to create things like creating diagrams using plantuml or graphviz.
Lelio Campanile

I was using Deckset since 3 years and I'm a beta tester for this new version, and I tell you that this version is amazing! Beyond the first version's features, now you can customise your presentation, change color, fonts, etc.. only for 1 slide or 2 o 3!

I think that this application is real fantastic and everyone makes slides and use markdown MUST to try it, you will never come back!!

Pros:

make slides in few time!

The presentations are are beautiful and you can insert image, video and other stuff in no time.

use markdown

Cons:

You could get issue if you want an exact position for text or image.

I want iPad version!!!!!

Wilson Almeida

This is my go to app to create my classes, I was looking for this for quite sometime. I tried reveal dabbled with beamer but this is much simpler for me and looks better out of the box.

You work on simple .md text files, at first this might seem backwards but the time you save by not having to go around poking in menus is amazing.

Pros:

No clutter, simple, good looking

Cons:

Lack of options to position images/graphics