Posted by starfallg 10 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.
Google is really shitting the bed in all the way that matters on GenAI and being an ex employee of Cloud I am not in the least surprised about it, just really sad.
Base64 is paired with compression to keep the size small so you can share it easily. The original version was around 1.3MB and maybe we can have a switch to output without compression. The source that generates it is all in Github.
Maybe I'm thinking too far ahead but I'm hoping maybe I can cover the (future?) compute costs by charging for the heavy duty ML that would have to be run non-locally but IDK. This isn't critical yet but would love to hear your musings.