iA Writer has previously been established as my writing app of choice. There is something about both the visual design and snappy interface the team at iA created that is just right for me. When I learned they were making a presentation editor the same week I needed to create some slides, I had to give it a try.
I was invited to a “PowerPoint” night1The details are unimportant. a few weeks ago, so I was suddenly thrust into a situation of making a set of slides that included something other than math lessons or sales figures. There was no style guide to start with. I opted to use Google Slides because it’s what I’m most familiar with, but wasn’t terribly happy with the result.
Then, I saw iA Presenter while poking around Mastodon. I hopped into its open beta to see if it could provide me with something new and interesting.
iA Presenter exists in reaction to all other slide creation software. It’s designed to force you into making a visually engaging presentation, because a cluttered slide will fall apart. Its promise is that if you craft a clear message, it will handle the layout and theming. That approach is presumptuous and also entirely justified. It takes a hardline stance on what a slide presentation should be: a striking visual tool that brings the audience through a story, with vital information and transition points clearly mapped out. Slides are not a reference document. They should not be comprehensive.
Let’s assume that this has some appeal to you. You want a simple set of slides with an image here, a few bullet points there, and a modern aesthetic that says “Hey, this is a hip young presenter who probably wears a Patagonia vest and fancy sneakers made with hemp.” I found that the process of creating a presentation using iA Presenter to be the cleanest and most straightforward experience I’ve ever had. I abhor the clicking and dragging required by standard PowerPoint-style programs. Despite my love of \LaTeX, Beamer is finicky and only a good idea if you have mathematical notation. iA Presenter looked at these interactions, and opted for a streamlined approach using only text.
You use markdown to create slides. Anything tabbed in gets put on the slide, and everything else in the “document” is just a note that fits linearly into your presentation. This is a huge benefit over the little boxes that PowerPoint and Slides provide for adding speaker notes. You can make an entire presentation through writing a document. It’s slick and quick.
What about the presentation itself? I believe iA fixed the most fundamental issue that all current tools fail at: half the time you go into “Presentation Mode”, you have absolutely no clue what will happen to your screen. What if you don’t have multiple monitors? What if you’re presenting over Zoom (or worse, an online meeting tool you haven’t used before)? Every interview I’ve been in that required some presentation, the interviewee had technical issues getting their slides to show to us over Google Meet in a way that allowed them to also see their notes. iA Presenter’s extremely straightforward solution is that the presentation is a separate window that you can resize and move wherever you need. You then share the window over Zoom, or drag it to the screen in the lecture hall. Then, it syncs the slides to the document you just wrote so the latter scrolls through your notes as you move forward in your presentation. It’s stupidly simple, and fixes so many issues I see.
Once your presentation is over, there are ample export options for sharing the slides with or without notes in whatever layout the audience would find preferable. They look good and are sensibly designed at all sizes. This program makes me want to find reasons to make slide decks.
Despite all my praise, I currently have no intention of paying for iA Presenter. Its buyout price of $89 is way higher than iA Writer, and I don’t make presentations outside of work often enough to pay for a subscription. However, I highly recommend checking out the free trial to see how you enjoy both the creation process and the final result. If I do come up with reasons to use it, I will happily pay for a month of use at a time. I have no desire to use anything else to create basic presentations.
To wrap this all up, here is the slide deck I created with iA Presenter. I played around with different themes, but liked the bold contrast of this “New York” option for a late night presentation to a bunch of PhD students I didn’t know. I’m pretty happy with the results.
icebreaker- 1The details are unimportant.