Slideas is a new Mac app that turns Markdown text into fancy, stylish presentations. It’s like Keynote, only entirely driven by typed text. And like Keynote and PowerPoint, you can add videos, charts, images and more. How does it work?
Markdown?
Photo: Neomobili
I’m a Markdown fan. I use it daily in writing app Ulysses. This very article is written in Markdown, and then converted into a WordPress post for your reading pleasure. And that’s the beauty of Markdown. It’s a plain-text format, so you can write it in literally any text editor, and then you can process it to create, well, pretty much anything. The same source file can become an HTML web page, a PDF, a rich-text email and, now, a multislide presentation.
Slideas
Photo: Neomobili
Slideas takes your Markdown text, then processes it in the usual way, turning it into styled text, with headings, italics, images and so on. But it also lets you style this text further. In short, you use pull-down menus to decide, on the fly, how the various elements of your document will look. That is, a heading is still a heading, and a list item is still a list item, but you can change what all the headings and list items look like wherever they appear in the document.
I love this approach, because it’s the exact same thing all Markdown parsers do — taking the raw text and interpreting it for your end purpose. It also means — like with all Markdown — that you can change the anchor style for headings in one place, and all your headings instantly change, everywhere.
Perhaps the easiest way to to see this in action is to … see it in action. Here’s the Slideas promo video:
Slideas adds some new items to the Markdown, including a title tag and tags for layout, theme and size. So, it’s more in the spirit of Markdown than 100% compatible. It also offers support for math formatting, embedded local or YouTube videos, tables, dark mode, footnotes, templates, and fancy transitions between slides.
I’ve been looking for an app like this for some time. I don’t make presentations, but I do want an app that lets me style Markdown output for making posters and the like. Unfortunately, I cannot use Slideas because it requires macOS Mojave or later. Otherwise I’d be all over it. Check it out in the Mac App Store.
Price: $29.99
Download: Slideas from the App Store (macOS)
