Posted by starfallg 5 hours ago
To avoid this loop, I ended up creating Bento, a single HTML file with everything you need in a slide tool including animations and shared editing. There's no install or cloud login, everything works offline. The default deck is around 560 KB and it doesn't need to fetch anything once you got it.
Open it in a browser and then you can edit, present, print and save. Share it via email or via Airdrop and all they need is a browser to edit, present and also do live collab on the slides. Drop it in to Claude or ChatGPT to transform existing pptx files into Bento slides. There is no cloud involved, only an encrypted blind relay to allow for shared editing. The relay doesn't see any of the data.
Check it out at https://bento.page/slides/ which takes you straight to the editor.
Go to https://bento.page/guestbook/ to try out the live guestbook to experience share editing / collab.
There is also a gallery with some sample decks on the website - https://bento.page/
All the code is MIT licensed and you can find it here - https://github.com/nyblnet/bento . I used reveal.js with several other libraries (including some homegrown ones), and Claude Code.
The file contains more or less two sections. There is a plain block of JSON near the top of the file which is the slide data. You can read, grep, or point a harness at it. The app itself is in a base64 blob that loads through a small shim which deflates in the browser with DecompressionStream, which keeps the package small and so that we don't need to fetch any external files at runtime. File System Access API is used for JSON writeback into the same file, which falls back to a plian download and all updates are ECDSA signed.
I started with reveal.js which served as a base, and incorporated GSAP/Flip to handle the animation. Then I added charting with echarts, but due to a number of issues with size and how the worked, I ended up re-implementing both.
What I'm most pleased about is how seamless the CRDT works. The blind relay is a small file that runs on Cloudflare Durable Objects, and all it sees are the encrypted data from the clients. Collab is off until we turn it on in the app (by starting a session by sharing by invite file), and then some sets of keys are generated. Access is handled by user key, and you can have read-only users, and also revoke live collab access by user as well.
Hopefully simpler formats like this will become the norm and the old ones can die.
It might not have reached legal generic status but just about any working professional will understand what you mean if you refer to "making a powerpoint deck" even if you don't use the actual Microslop product.
When I was playing with this, I immediately thought of TiddlyWikis, which I've always been fond of, but they never took for me. However, an easily editable presentation -- that's a use case I can understand.
I couldn't see how there was a CDRT when I'm just working with a single file. I was trying to figure out where the server was. So -- this is just on for everyone? Are you concerned that your Cloudflare account will be hammered with this?
All of it just runs out of a folder on disk and can either be deployed locally or on a server behind a login. I intend to open source it, but I'm not quite proud enough yet of some of the implementation aspects to do so. Hope to do it this summer though!
Cloudflare Durable Objects are pretty cheap and I'm using it like a very basic pub/sub with each deck having it's own DO. I did some calculations and it should be well within my spend limits.
It may be annoying if two users are working at the same time in the same project.
Again, very cool project! :)
e.g. https://revealjs.com/#/2/1 <-- from here you can go up or down, then go right to continue the presentation.
You just make one slide deck with lightweight high-abstraction slides and depending on the audience you just... hit the down arrow. bam. now you're inside the tech slides. no nerdy tech guys? sweet, don't hit down on slide 3. Instead you're with the marketing guys, so hit down on slide 5.
Anyway - looks like you got rid of that in order to mimic Powerpoint, but... don't forget it's there. it's my favorite part of using Reveal.js!
Can I click upgrade and get the JSON slide deck data exported into a v2 shell?
I am personally using kimi k3 to create a mobile friendly set of games, starting from math like linear algebra to quantum physics - neurodivergent friendly, completely local state, served from github pages - to get someone interested in the field. This needs an economic incentive to exist without LLMs, because of so much different expertise needed, and time.
if anyone's interested in the games let me know - i plan to play it myself, improve it, remove bugs etc before publishing on HN.
For a long time I've used draw.io for making diagrams, and found it clever that you can effectively save your document as an iframe blob of editor + file (though in their case, the editor is not stored in the file, a web connection is required to load the editor codebase. I've wished that could be the primary use case and this is basically what I'd imagined!
My M1 Mac froze in the end (had to hard-reboot), but that was so much fun! I guess there’s a reason Figma uses WASM and a custom renderer, though I guess your implementation should work fine for most cases (i.e. not when all of HN are trying to edit everything simultaneously :^)
Two notes:
1. It would be nice if another person changing something unrelated to what I’m doing didn’t reset the focus for me.
2. WAY too llm-y copy both on the landing page and the example deck. Your HN submission text is way easier and more pleasant to read.
And huge kudos for releasing this as FOSS!
1. Yes, that's a good point that somebody else raised also. It went pass testing as I was only testing with 1 or 2 other people at once. Will fix this tonight.
2. Yeah, agreed and fair point. But I don't write well and I don't have time between day job and being a dad. Will try to fix this gradually.
2. Absolutely fair point, and it’s okay – the demo speaks for itself :-) Although if you wrote that submission text yourself, you do write pretty well! But obviously no pressure here.
I don't think WP is the right place for this. It is supposed to be a tertiary source, not a place to promote concepts you want to see established.
[0]: https://mdwiki.info
[0] https://www.ilograph.com/demo/intelligentDocumentProcessing....
Internal IT fiefdoms everywhere should be very afraid
Maybe you can implement this into the project, a blank default read only (except author details) that installs as a pwa.
I hope you don't get cease and desisted by MS for mentioning PowerPoint.
- slidev markdown-based slides, I often have a code-agent make these. https://github.com/slidevjs/slidev
- typst slides are great looking too, especially with math etc. Again easy for agents to do
One minor nit: Based on the title, I thought this was literally a tool that had something to do with PowerPoint, but "PowerPoint" is used here as a synonym for "Presentation", which is ironic/unfortunate given how many dislike PowerPoint.