

Show HN: Haiku Deck - A Simple iPad App for Making Beautiful Presentations - astartupaday1
http://www.haikudeck.com

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randfish
Love this product, but please, please, please get me a web version so I can
build decks from a non-Apple device. I'm just not in deck-building mode on my
phone or a little tablet.

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astartupaday1
Thanks, glad you like it.

Actually our initial plan was to launch the web version and tablet version at
the same time, but we decided to focus 100% on the iPad for the v1 launch, and
use feedback (like this) to determine the next platform to expand to. We're a
team of three so we're trying not to get spread too thin. :)

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pc86
Initial platform choice aside, I think this was the right course of action.
For three of you (all technical?), launching on two high-quality platforms
simultaneously would be asking for trouble. For those of us that don't have
our iPad in front of us at the moment, could you explain the Bento IAP is and
what we get for that $15?

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astartupaday1
The app is free and ships with 5 professionally-designed "themes" that can be
applied to customize the presentation with different fonts and image filter
options. We included an additional 10 themes that can be purchased for $1.99
each, or you can buy the "Bento Box" pack that includes all 10 themes for $15.

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astartupaday1
We built Haiku Deck because we hated boring PowerPoint presentations. We
stripped out most of the features of a traditional presentation software and
built it from the ground up to be optimized for content-creation on a tablet.
Decks can be shared online, and also exported to PowerPoint or pdf for offline
viewing.

To get a sense of what a typical deck looks like, here's a sample presentation
that showcases some of my favorite quotes from the amazing @shit_hn_says
twitter account: <http://www.haikudeck.com/p/aP4taPvt7w/shit-hn-says>

Would love to hear what you guys think.

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mirsadm
That looks like a pretty cool looking app. I really like the design of your
web site & app. You say you're not focusing on 'boring PowerPoint
presentations', it seems that most of your examples are more like photo
slideshows. It might help to show some more traditional style presentations in
there as well.

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astartupaday1
Thanks, that's a great suggestion. We're getting some pretty diverse decks
that our users have started to create, we'll start featuring those in the
gallery soon.

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tharris0101
This looks beautiful. I'll download it tonight and mess around with it. One
suggestion from the video and gallery:

Everything looks like very nicely laid out title cards that don't really hold
much information. Does the actual app allow for more data if needed? I know we
all hate bullet-pointed PowerPoint, but the inclusion of things like charts
and graphs, quotes, paragraphs of text, etc are sometimes needed in real
business presentations. If the app does allow for this sort of thing, then the
video maybe should be updated to show some more variety. Otherwise, it might
be something to think about for the next release.

Anyway, it looks great! Good work guys.

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astartupaday1
Thanks, appreciate the feedback. One of the goals we have is to make you a
better presenter. For v1, we researched presentation best practices and built
the app so users automatically do things like limit the amount of text per
slide, use consistent fonts and text placements, and add emotional impact to
words with high-quality (no clip-art!) images. The constraints are
intentional, and in fact was the inspiration for the name, as a Haiku is an
art form that promotes creativity through constraint.

That being said, I think there are lots of opportunities in the future to help
users add features like bullet points and charts, while still keeping it
simple and guiding the users towards creating effective presentations.

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dangoor
This looks very attractive, but I suggest reading slide:ology, Presentation
Zen and such. Haiku looks like it will make beautiful backdrops for a talk,
but the sharing of "slideuments" is a bug, imho.

There's either too much detail in the slides to keep them from being
distracting from the actual talk or too little detail to make them useful as a
standalone document.

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marcamillion
This looks awesome....out of curiosity, I wonder how this handles numbers and
graphs.

I imagine the vast majority of presentations do include some presentations of
numbers and charts.

I don't see anything on the landing page that talks about it - and maybe the
answer is you haven't built that yet (MVP and all).

Just thought I would throw it out there.

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astartupaday1
Yep, for v1 we don't have support for charts/graphs, but it's on the roadmap.
In the meantime, we do have the option to export to PowerPoint for users who
want to include graphs, tables, lens flares, or comic sans.

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jpxxx
I like this quite a bit. I had some goofy thing done and upon FB, Twitter, and
.PPTX in ten minutes.

It's best described as [Distillate of Keynote: iPad Edition]. The auto-license
Creative Commons image siphoner is brilliant. It all looks good without
effort. Theme swapping is effortless.

My criticisms as a nobody: the "doodle font" on the overlays showing you what
does what is too jaunty and busy for me to read quickly. I had multiple
sluggard-hangs on the Deck chooser (iPad 2, ios5) that left me with dead UI
requiring a restart. And the first launch experience is just a little too busy
to take in. Nothing fatal at all, but I don't feel in control when things are
happening with every touch. It feels weird when I can manipulate the screen
when the explanatory help overlay is on.

This is really good work, and it has succeeded in making Keynote look fussy.
Thank you!

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astartupaday1
Thanks, glad you like the image search (it was a lot of work!) :) Sorry for
the issues on the deck chooser, I've been meaning to re-write that for a while
and will bump it up the list. I actually just added in a new first-launch
experience, and I'm cleaning up a bug with those overlays, will be available
in the next update.

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prezjordan
This is stunning. But I found a couple issues.

\- Crashes if I try to delete the two default presentations (unless I make one
first) \- Text in title and description boxes is always capitalized, and I
need to hit shift on every keypress, very annoying.

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ako
Very nice app. Here's my wishlist:
<http://www.haikudeck.com/p/wpf2bbxWk9/haiku-deck-wish-list>

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astartupaday1
I love this, thank you. :) I added a bunch of these ideas to our Trello board.

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TheIronYuppie
I came in preparing to hate, but must admit they beauty and simplicity pretty
much won me over. It's like Prezi but for humans :)

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toddz
Beautiful app - it's an inspiring way to share ideas and forces you to refine
them. Death to Powerpoint and long live Haiku!

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scottporad
You guys gotta download this app and check it out...this thing is amazingly
cool!

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sharingancoder
Looks awesome! Good stuff!

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phmagic
This is really well done.

