
Show HN: I'm a professor who has developed an interactive Powerpoint alternative - twoslide
http://2sli.de
======
kevhito
I have taught for years using UW's Classroom Presenter software, hacked up to
be more responsive and usable with a tablet and pen. So I'm fully on board
with the concept.

But frankly, the execution seems lacking. The qrcode/sms polling is fine, if
you care about that sort of thing, but there are many similar and better
solutions [1] out there. You can already mirror and do remote displays easily
even with stock powerpoint/ooffice/keynote.

The one feature this and UW CP really bring is the annotation. In UW CP,
especially my hacked version, the annotation tools are very good quality. You
can use an active pen (e.g. wacomm digitizer on a Lenovo laptop/tablet) for
accurate writing and drawing, and it has very low latency response, pressure
sensitive line width, etc. In software you can zoom slides, delete/move
annotations, change colors and pen types via a tablet-friendly palette. You
can save your annotations and import them back into ppt as "ink" objects, and
vice versa.

I don't see any of that in the poster's demo. The drawing is clunky,
unresponsive, and looks bad. Can you imagine trying to write a note on a slide
with that system?

Having worked on the guts of UW CP, I know that one of the hardest things was
export/import from powerpoint. It is _very_ hard to get right, especially with
build animations. Font size 24 doesn't export correctly in many cases. Margins
and objects shift and move slightly. Exporting can be very slow -- many
seconds per slide, depending on complexity. Parsing the actual pptx files and
replicating the actual look without using powerpoint APIs is essentially
impossible.

~~~
twoslide
Thanks for the feedback (ouch!). I agree that the app is not-suitable for
fine-grained drawing, and for target users specialised hardware won't work.

I'm curious about the link referenced in [1] - there is polling software out
there (e.g PollAnywhere), but it is limited to polls. I think the text
responses and future developments (image uploads, audience-designed slides)
could provide better interactivity.

Yes, powerpoint import/export sucks. Import is functional in terms of pictures
and text, using python-pptx. Export is probably a longer-term goal and not a
high-priority (if people want to make pptx, powerpoint is always going to be
the best option).

~~~
kevhito
Sorry about the missing reference. I was thinking of (a) classroom clickers,
(b) poll everywhere, which as you point out is limited to polls, and (c) UW
CP's student feature, which allows more interactivity but requires students to
install the UW CP client on a laptop or tablet.

Big picture, I'm sure you are right that there is a lot of
unexplored/unexploited classroom tech that could leverage smartphones and sms
for better collaborative and interactive work.

Incidentally, if you are looking for powerpoint export, the best way I found
was to basically to export each slide as an image, including every animation
step. Pathetic, slow, but mostly reliable.

------
gravypod
One of the biggest features of PowerPoint is that it runs offline. This is
very important for many reasons. It's the Doctor Sues of business tools. You
can use it on a boat, with a goat, in the rain, on a train, and you can use it
ANYWHERE. If you can match that feature, than this might be worth another
look. Otherwise, you have effectively created another Prezi.

~~~
twoslide
You can run it offline two ways:

* Choose the "offline download" option in the main menu. In your browser do some version of "Save" with the type "Webpage Complete." This saves as a webpage with all associated CSS and JS. You can run it anywhere. If you have an internet connection, you will receive interaction data (e.g. poll responses)

* Download a full-slide PDF (less desirable, but more familiar)

These features need to be better documented, I'll try to work on a blog entry
on this!

It is NOT the same as Prezi as the emphasis is on interaction. Last time I
checked, Prezi (and Powerpoint) presentations are deterministic: from the
minute you hit run there's not much you or the audience can do to change the
slides. The goal is to change that as much as possible: if you're going to
take the audience as serious participants in your presentation, they need to
be able to influence it's outcome. The presentation should be less about
information transfer, more about brainstorming or co-creation. I have a long
way to go there technically, but that's my thinking!

~~~
gravypod
There is another problem for, I am assuming, many people on here. Giving a
copy of your presentation data to a 3rd party company is horrible for opsec.

In the financing industry? Get ready for someone to take advantage of all of
your investing knowledge. In the contrasting business? Get ready to be sued,
or if you're working for the government get ready to take an all expense paid
vacation to Guantanamo.

You need to be able to make sure that your data stays offline ALL the time.
Something like this is not practical as I cannot ensure that my data will stay
as secret as can be.

edit: Fixed Guantanamo sentence.

~~~
6stringmerc
Fair enough, but in every instance in my professional experience where
presentation data has leaked (unauthorized) - or full presentations themselves
- they were sourced/obtained/provided by a former internal employee of the
prior firm, or a current employee with strong enough ties to the recipient to
justify the procedure.

Granted I'm somewhat biased in that a lot of the work experience I did in
presentations was for public entities who had significant channels for
obtaining submitted documents by all interested parties (e.g. Florida's
Sunshine Law). Even with marking certain things "Proprietary and Confidential"
there were judgment calls to be made about what to put in and why.

Yes, on several occasions the submitted materials ended up being used by the
potential client and their current service provider (i.e. investment
strategies), and with little to no recourse. Cost of doing business. Can only
protect so much.

------
slavik81
I realize that you're trying to show off the features of your software, but
overuse of slide animations is a really bad look. In addition to explicitly
communicating the features of your product, your example slides should
inherently make me think 'I wish my presentations were like that'.

~~~
twoslide
Thanks, that is a good point. The demo presentation is actually a bit dated
and could use updating. The demo video is actually better:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YXthp3vcJs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YXthp3vcJs)

One less-visible feature of the site is that users can edit the theme,
including the CSS, and save as a new theme (either public or private). I'd
love to attract some good designers who might make themes. My own design
skills are limited and ultimately designers are going to make better looking
slides.

------
phillc73
I'd like to mention the tool I use: Slidify[1,2]

Basically HTML5 slides from R Markdown. Interactivity also available. [3,4]

Perhaps not was WYSIWYG as 2sli.de, which looks quite nice, but Slidify is
great if you know R and want to include code snippets too.

[1] [http://slidify.github.io/](http://slidify.github.io/) [2]
[http://slidify.org/samples/intro/#1](http://slidify.org/samples/intro/#1) [3]
[https://github.com/slidify/interactive](https://github.com/slidify/interactive)
[4]
[http://slidify.github.io/dcmeetup/demos/interactive/](http://slidify.github.io/dcmeetup/demos/interactive/)

------
castratikron
One of my college physics professors had a more low-tech solution: hand
everyone a set of cards labeled A, B, and C and have everyone answer
powerpoint questions that way.

~~~
kevhito
Visiting MSR/Bangalore I was shown a neat demo using very simple QRcode-like
paper and image recognition. Basically, each student had a paper they could
hold up. On the front was a simple QR-code (facing the prof and camera). On
the back on the edges were 4 possible answers, something like A/1/YES, B/2/NO,
C/3/MAYBE, D/4/DONT-KNOW. The student would _rotate_ the paper so their chosen
answer was on top, then hold it up. A camera in the front of the room would
detect in realtime and display the results. They even had an augmented reality
smartphone app that would cover/highlight the students and their responses.

Oh, and the QR codes were per student, so answers could be tracked.

~~~
whorleater
This sounds like so much of a physical struggle that doesn't scale very well.

~~~
kevhito
I'm not sure what scale you mean. The demo I saw involved 100+ students in a
crowded low-income rural Indian classroom with one teacher. The qrcodes were
printed on regular paper on an inkjet printer. The image recognition software
ran entirely on a cheap desktop with a webcam. The whole thing was designed
for that type of environment.

I doubt it will be used much -- teachers who care seemed to be in even shorter
supply than the minimal tech needed to run this -- but the guys at MSR that
created it had put an surprising amount of work into making the image
recognition fast and efficient. They had a smartphone-only version too, but it
had some limitations, if I recall, because the processing power just wasn't
quite there yet.

------
LargeCompanies
Nice job, yet I'm curious how many Interactive Powerpoint apps are out there
now?

Slides.com offers the ability to use your phone as a remote and I'm guessing
there's a few others out there?

~~~
twoslide
And thanks!

------
BHSPitMonkey
The interactive polling stuff is neat, though it seems like it would occupy a
lot more time in a presentation than the old-fashioned "show of hands" it's
replacing (given the time an audience would need to pull out their phones and
try to scan the QR / type the URL / send the SMS).

The on-device view of the current and upcoming slides (as well as speaker
notes, and maybe even drawing) are also built into the Google Slides app's UI
when you are casting to a Chromecast.

~~~
brianpgordon
You could have all of the students scan the QR code or enter some text at the
beginning of the lecture and keep a session running so that the voting
controls work throughout the lecture.

------
gmmeyer
There are some things that can be done better. There are some things that can
be improved. This isn't a perfect product. But it's one that I want! Good job!

Other people covered most of the issues well enough, I think. One key thing
that I think you should do is make the cursor change in the appropriate ways
when hovering over certain things. It's not a terribly hard css change and I
think it would make the app look a lot more polished.

~~~
twoslide
Thanks, yes that would be appropriate (e.g. a movable object should have a
movable cursor). I'll check through the app for this, although any specifics
are much appreciated. I'd be grateful for feedback on your experience, my
email is on the "About" page.

------
aarthielizabeth
The presentation industry was stagnant for almost two decades until Prezi and
a bunch of new software brought some life in to it. Thankfully the focus has
slowly shifted from the “software” to the “presenter and the audience”.

There are a few exciting tools in the market that focus on audience engagement
and interaction.

ShowTime from Zoho is one such product. It’s a cloud based service that brings
interactivity into presentations by connecting the presenter to the audience
and is quite popular in the market currently. It works well with PowerPoint
too.

It’s a product that will suit any type of presentation including classroom set
up where presenters/lecturers want students to interact with them during a
lecture. Students can ask questions privately, rate slides, share feedback
etc, using their smartphone or their laptop. Plus, advanced analytics will
tell how well their session fared. I would suggest you a look at it if you
have plans to refine your app.

Here are two other tools in the same space: Presentain and SlideKlowd (both
very effective for live presentations). Hope this helps. All the best. :)

~~~
Tepix
Keynote was released in 2003, do you consider it being part of the stagnation
of the presentation industry?

------
neltnerb
A few little thoughts:

I love that your graphics are decently large by default and the text is
reasonably sized. Biggest complaint with PowerPoint and Excel for me is that
the default settings make no sense and are next to illegible when projected.

That said, this seems like an application ripe for the use of the figure style
guides from long ago, which you may appreciate. This link shows some really
clever thoughts on how to present data most legibly, and since you're
dynamically generating a lot of it this seems ripe for implementation.

[http://www.juretriglav.si/standards-for-graphic-
presentation...](http://www.juretriglav.si/standards-for-graphic-
presentation/)

I do think the typography needs some work, I'm personally having a rather hard
time tracking a line of text due to weight/line spacing or something. Or maybe
there's just too much text on the slides in the demo? But I'm not a
typographer so I'll leave that to other people to comment on more
productively.

------
hkeide
This has an impressive feature set for such a young product.

I'm a cofounder of [https://www.swipe.to/](https://www.swipe.to/) and we
support some similar things:

\- Markdown slides

\- Embedding YouTube and Vimeo videos

\- Control presentation on your phone by swiping

\- Privacy by default

\- Live collaboration

~~~
6stringmerc
Somewhat tongue-in-cheek but based in reality question: Before your software
embeds the YouTube or Vimeo videos, it opens up an email or contact system by
which the presentation author must contact and get approval from the content
owner before being embedded, right?

------
m3andros
In terms of building a title and effective presentations, better than
PowerPoint or Keynote combined, I use LectoraOnline.com. It has everything I
need: QR code generator, embedding of video, HTML export, SCORM compliant,
editable themes, and Responsive presentations. That's a short list, as there's
more, but it's an incredible app. It's close relative, I'd venture to guess,
is Captivate or maybe even Storyline.

Great job on this cool concept! I will definitely check it out. Thank you!

~~~
twoslide
Thanks, I'll check out LectoraOnline too to see what I can learn.

------
twoslide
For those interested in more, please also check out the demo video:
[https://youtu.be/Sc6cIAJBkmU](https://youtu.be/Sc6cIAJBkmU)

------
potatote
Just a side question because you mentioned being a professor: is this
work/project related to academic research (in other words, do you plan to
publish about your usability findings)? Or is this a product that will become
more feature-full over time? The tool looks neat and I like the preview
feature that can only be seen on the smart devices. I'll certainly use this
for my next presentation. Thank you! :)

------
haberdasher
In a similar vein: [https://presentio.us](https://presentio.us)

Disclosure: I'm the developer of this.

~~~
martin-adams
I briefly checked out the "See Presentious in action" section. I would have
preferred to see some more engaging sample presentations. In fact, those
presentations seem to exhibit most of the reasons why Powerpoint slides
considered bad.

Bad presentation traits include:

\- Walls of text or bullet points

\- Cliché stock imagery

\- Reading exactly what is on the slide

\- Lack of emotive connections with the imagery

\- Dry and monotone voice

\- Each slide should really convey one key point

One story I heard from an audiobook was the CEO of a company attending a
nervous staff member's presentation. The CEO sat in front of the screen and
faced the presenter, not looking at the slides. Appearing that this may be a
disaster, the CEO later expressed, if there's something important to be said,
the presenter would say it, not hide it in the slides.

~~~
haberdasher
I can't claim that having the ability to record your presentation will
instantly cure all of the ills common to bad presentations.

Our hypothesis is that if you know what you're saying is captured along with
your slides, you'll put less information in the slides. That should remedy the
walls of text and bullet points. The same goes for reading the slide - if it's
not there, you won't do it.

Stock Imagery, Dry and monotone voices, Lack of emotive connections with the
imagery --- If you know of an algorithm to correct this stuff, holler at me:
george@presentio.us

------
IMTDb
One of my friends is the creator of Wooclap :
[https://www.wooclap.com/](https://www.wooclap.com/) It's quite cool to
compare how a similar idea (engage your audience by text/web) lead to
different execution. Congratulations on your product :)

What is the use of the QR Code displayed on the demo slides ?

~~~
twoslide
Thanks, wooclap looks really good and possibly more simple. Will check it out
in more detail!

The QR code leads to the web-response (e.g. it encodes the URL g.2sli.de) I
found some audience members had trouble with the short domain, they would
write things like g.2sli.de.com or g.www.2Sli.de - the QR code made it easier
for some to respond! Taking a picture of the QR code with the default android
camera offers an option to open the link.

------
t0rb3n
I'm not 100% sure, but since you're using a de domain, you probably have to
include legal information in your about page:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressum)

~~~
Tepix
The requirement is for German websites. German websites are defined as being
published by individuals or organisations that are based in Germany, so an
Impressum is required regardless of whether a site is in the .de domain.

------
contangoandcash
why wouldnt you just use reveal js?

~~~
twoslide
I think I would highlight the following features: * Interactions: last time I
checked RevealJS does not offer any kind of interactions. It tends to be
hosted as static HTML files, so you need some kind of logic to process
interactions * Control: Although I believe slides.com allows phone as remote,
a user-hosted reveal JS presentation would not. * Ease of use - many users
don't want to edit HTML files. Even I didn't want to keep editing HTML files.

However, I agree that RevealJS is great and I did use it in my lectures after
I gave up powerpoint!

------
widforss
I seriously was contemplating a business idea on my way home from work today
that was based on making polling via sms easy.

~~~
twoslide
While others have rightly pointed out pollanywhere, I'm looking to go beyond
just polls. I have text based discussions and will be adding audience
annotations (useful for small meetings, brainstorming, etc) in the near
future.

~~~
widforss
Not really related, but I had another idea (more of an art project) about
installing a projector in a public place or maybe on a uni campus that you
could text to and have it project your message. Some kind of experiment of
uncensored amplification of speech.

~~~
softawre
They do this at a lot of conferences, at least using Twitter instead of SMS.

------
ramy_d
Are slides built using a WYSIWYG editor?

~~~
twoslide
Yes, please try it out! I'm also planning to add a "rapid compose" version
using markdown (for some people point and click is slower than typing).

------
such_a_casual
Why is a sign up required to use this?

~~~
twoslide
Well, the presentation is private by default. It would be hard to associate
that data with you without a sign-up (I guess unique URLS would be an option).
I also made it for myself to use in the first instance, and having some kind
of login worked well for me!

The user authentication uses a fairly mature package that follows good
practices (e.g. passwords not stored in clear text).

------
santaclaus
How well is video handled?

~~~
twoslide
Try it and tell me (please)! You can embed youtube and vimeo very easily. I'm
planning to use an API like oembed ([http://oembed.com/](http://oembed.com/))
to handle a greater variety of media soon. You can also control your slides
using a tablet, which can be pretty slick.

------
eecks
> experimental > may be bugs

Ah yes.. let me give a presentation with this software.

------
sova
you're the man

------
prtkgpt
pretty cool!

