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Posted by starfallg 6 hours ago

Show HN: Bento - An entire PowerPoint in one HTML file (edit+view+data+collab)(bento.page)
Over the past few months, our team has been building more and more slidedecks using web frontend technologies with coding harnesses like Claude Code, but a common complaint is to make even small edits we need to edit the code either manually or via the harness.

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.

515 points | 106 commentspage 2
syhol 4 hours ago|
Looks very good and I'm excited to try it out properly. It's a shame about the name considering a lot of self-hosters will be using BentoPDF. But thats one of two hard things in Computer Science.
starfallg 4 hours ago|
Aw man! Well it is very different to what BentoPDF is doing. I'm sure nobody would get confused!
aag 4 hours ago||
What an ambitious and impressive project! I'm going to try it.

One note: The home page says "Nothing phones home," but the Bento files I've examined include a cloudflareinsights.com beacon.

starfallg 4 hours ago||
Thanks for raising that. It might be in the standard cloudflare/actors SDK I used for Cloudflare Durable Objects. I'll try to disable this behavour and if we couldn't, we'll rip out DO and replace it with something that doesn't phone home. Apologies I wasn't thorough enough here.
Willamin 48 minutes ago|||
> include a cloudflareinsights.com beacon.

Agreed that the homepage should not indicate otherwise, but on the plus side with a tool like Bento you can edit the HTML file locally, remove the script tag at the bottom that does that, and never worry about that tracking again!

starfallg 3 hours ago|||
Just an update to this phone home issue. I haven't found anything showing that this should be normal behaviour. I'm thinking this may be due to cloudflare challenges due to the traffic spike. In addition to the DO, the whole website sits behind a Cloudflare proxy.

Will keep chipping away at this and update as I learn more.

pembrook 4 hours ago||
By ambitious and impressive do you mean for Claude?

Because while cool this is clearly heavily vibe coded.

aag 4 hours ago||
I'm don't care. If it's good, it's good.
pembrook 3 hours ago||
Agreed, but the days of software projects being ambitious or impressive are over.
rob 3 hours ago||
Because they didn't write all the code by hand? Seems like an odd measurement for determining if a project is ambitious or impressive. Clearly this one is based on the replies here.
Shorel 1 hour ago||
I really loved when this was a feature of the Opera browser, before they went chromium.
starfallg 59 minutes ago|
I used Opera for a while, but I didn't recall it doing this. Do you have a link to show what it was able to do?
dptrsa 4 hours ago||
I've been reading HN much longer than I've had an account, and I have never once left a comment or interacted with any post. Had to break the seal to say great job with this. Really fantastic out of the box, and timely thinking. I'll be using this for sure.
starfallg 4 hours ago|
Thanks! It's also my first submission to HN after reading and commenting on here for the last 7 years!
trentor 5 hours ago||
I like it. I used Claude and Qwen to build single file HTML decks in the last few months. The nicest thing with HTML decks is that you can not only ship the decks but integrate your prototype/demos in the same file integrated into the flow of your deck. Would love to see a feature like that.
starfallg 5 hours ago|
Thanks. That would be a cool feature, and definitely possible. Currently it's already got a feature where you can export and import it's data JSON. We just need to find a way to squeeze a whole frontend in.
mklarmann 4 hours ago||
I recently did something similar with just asking claude to create me a presentation with GSAP animations. With a some nice features to embed apps, switch the language while presenting, etc. - it works like a charm: https://eos-lci.gitlab.io/eos-lci-presentations/klimabuendni... (all open source)
TeeWEE 4 hours ago||
Was using Reveal.js which worked well because it can use any HTML or any plugin.

Bento works with a predefined schema, so you cant use any HTML library (Such as Mermaid.js) if you need it in your presentation.

But then again, often you dont need it.

Just created a presentation with Bento... I do think Reveal.js gives you more raw power. But I like bentos single html page design, and you can easily edit it manually. You cant do that with Reveal.js

starfallg 4 hours ago|
Yup, I'm trying to see if we can add arbitrary JS. I think it may be possible, but would take a bit longer to test out different approaches. However I guess the main target audience for this is coders that interact with non-coders when doing presentations, and I think currently this approach is sufficient.
seu 2 hours ago||
This looks like a great idea, thanks for sharing it!
momojo 5 hours ago||
This blew my socks off. Theres something so satisfying about knowing everything I need is in a single file. I know the caveat is *1. Have a modern browser*, but this is my go to format when trying out random ideas. I even have a macro called `try` that sends me directly to a new folder called `scratch/YYYYMMDD_<try_bento>`.

Great work! I hope to see more and more apps like this in the spirit of "Toss it all into context"

starfallg 5 hours ago|
Thanks, you're right, that is the achilles heel. Most of the functionality actually is in the browser. We're just running fancy scripting on it.
jmuguy 2 hours ago|
This might just be a Firefox thing but the animations are really struggling on my system here - very slow and choppy.
runxel 18 minutes ago||
Was about to say the same. It's really a slideshow – and that being on an M1! Can't imagine how much worse it probably is on Windows.
starfallg 56 minutes ago||
Yeah, unless you were using the guestbook which was being hammered, I'm afraid you are right. I use Firefox, but it's not my main browser and I must confess I didn't do much testing on it. I'll have to look to see how we can improve performance on FF.
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