At my previous job we used Google Slides, and I rapidly came to hate it. Here's why Figma Slides has me excited:
- I use animation a lot, for many reasons, such as keeping audience focus on parts of the slide and visually explaining information changes and multi-step processes. It's particularly helpful for video. Figma already has much better tools for this; Google's are not particularly powerful and buggy as hell.
- Consistency. Google Slides will sometimes render the same text object with wrapping at different points on different machines. I shouldn't have to manually add line breaks to deal with this.
- Precision and flexibility. Google Slides just isn't anywhere near as smooth at design work as Figma. I don't even consider myself a designer and yet I regularly hit Google Slides's limitations.
- Layer/object lists. (Note: I don't see this in the Figma Slides demos, but I assume it's available in design mode?) Once you have a bunch of shapes on a slide, especially grouped, it makes selection so much easier. I don't want to play click roulette when trying to select one object from a pile.
(If you're wondering why I'm focused on Google Slides: Apple Keynote is great but can't collaborate through Google Workspace. I haven't used PowerPoint much, it's okay.)
UPDATE: I've now done a little playing with Figma Slides.
The good news is that it has an object list. But it's only in Design Mode. (So it won't be available to free or non-designer accounts - that's a Figma thing.)
The bad news is that in this beta the animation tools are even less flexible than Google Slides: you can only choose from a limited set of transitions; those transitions apply to the entire slide, not to individual objects; and there's no way to change the timing or easing. However, "smart animate" is one of the transitions, which does a Magic-Move-like "move the objects in slide 1 to their positions in slide 2".
(Note the emphasis on this beta. Figma Slides won't be considered GA until next year, so I'm hoping that all the animation tools from regular Figma will be available by then.)
All of the things you mentioned (save maybe layer lists) are why I fell in love with Keynote, and wish I could use it for all presentations.
Sadly, 99% of my time is spent in Google slides, which is like banging rocks together. Keynote's ability to do things like introspect into postscript/vector objects and align on lines within the object is one of those things that makes you re-evaluate how software should work.
I just wanted to praise Keynote, since it gets so little love.
Wow, I didn't know about that Keynote feature, that's amazing. it really shows the extent to which they care about visual design as an end result.
I desperately wish Apple's office apps got more development. They have the potential to be world-beating (especially Numbers) but Apple seems content to just update a couple of minor features a year and leave it at that.
Don't sleep on Numbers. It doesn't get a lot of attention but it can do some nice things in a much less bloated interface than Excel.
It's had regular expressions for a while for example, while Excel is just getting them.
I love being able to put multiple spreadsheets on a page and arrange them in whatever way you want. Reminds me of Lotus Improv [1] from back in the day.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv
I’ve been hot for this feature since the Improv days — I browbeat the AppleWorks people to support it better, and when a bunch of them split off to build <app I don’t remember the name of> I made sure they knew this was a key feature.
Ragtime still supports it as far as I know. https://www.ragtime.de/start.html?lang_id=en
Ragtime is still a thing??? I had the pleasure of working in Ragtime 2.5 and then 3 in 199x on a MacPlus (I had a job translating the manual for Cricket Presents - “PowerPoint” before PowerPoint - from English to danish).
It was one of the reasons I ‘got in to computers’(Macs) - it felt like it could ‘do it all’ and was so easy to use (at the time x86 based pc’s did not do the same for me…
Remarkably enough it seems so. Unfortunately I've never been in a place where 1. I needed its particular skillset 2. It was the best candidate for the job.
I love the idea of having multiple worksheets in a particular document so much, and yet 99.9% of the time I just throw open a google sheet and start throwing in numbers. The collaboration smoothness is a beats-all-else feature.
I like numbers, but AFAIK its file format is not open and Apple just dropped support for older versions some years ago.
Imagine not being able to open a spreadsheet from 5 years ago.
Keynote is absolutely the presentation software a designer would create, if they didn't have to do it while being saddled with inappropriate technologies.
I'm a pragmatist and I understand why collaborative editing and web-based "files" won out...but when you use a well-crafted piece of desktop software like Keynote it really makes you wistful for what might have been. People have forgotten how much of a hole you dig for yourself in when you have to build everything in the browser.
You prompted me to try out the little-known web version of Keynote on iCloud.com. I expected it to be surprisingly good if not quite up to the desktop standard, since Apple's front end web teams do amazing work. And sure enough, that's what it is.
I focused on animation features and it has most of those available in the desktop version, but it's missing a few (e.g. action build effects). It's also missing some of the image adjustments. But it's got Magic Move, and shape subtraction/intersection[1]. Most importantly feels pretty good to use, though it takes a while to load (on Chromium). I've no idea if they implemented that inner-detail object alignment - don't have an easy way of testing it.
[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/keynote/combine-or-break-apa... - note the feature about breaking apart SVG images too, I wonder if that's related to the inner-detail trick.
My only counter to this is that after, what, two _decades_, Apple _still_ has not added the ability to adjust number boxes with the up/down arrows on the keyboard (like text size for example). A designer would have included this on day 1, it’s such a common UI pattern in design tools.
If anyone on the iWork team is reading this, _please_ get to that Radar.
In my experience of many years, not only is Keynote fantastic, but Pages is better than Word and Numbers is better than Excel (though not the extensive Excel ecosystem).
???????
Nothing is better than Excel.
fair point :)
Keynote is awesome. Last I checked a few years ago though Numbers was nowhere even close to Excel. No dynamic array formulas, Power Query, lambda functions, VBA, etc. All are pretty essential if you're doing anything beyond basic spreadsheets but I may need to checkout Numbers again.
I should have qualified "better". I find Numbers easier to use for basic spreadsheet tasks. Advanced, programming-like tasks are better in Excel, which has many more advanced features. I don't think Numbers is Turing complete, but then again I tend to use Python rather than Excel for advanced math processing.
Word has some features that Pages doesn't have, but they're not commonly used, and if you're doing any kind of page layout, Pages is __much__ easier to work with than MS Word.
I agree. I recently tried to do something in MS Office that was fairly simple in Pages: create a straightforward invoice.
I discovered that Word doesn’t even support formulae in its tables, which came as a great surprise. Apparently I needed to do this in Excel, which of course meant that the whole document needed to be written as fixed-width cells. This totally sucked for my use case.
Agreed. I've been using Pages quite a lot during the past year, growing frustrated with Word, and Pages is surprisingly good. It is much easier to use and to get nice results.
Not too long ago I had to write a short paper in the current version of Word for Mac for a class I was taking and was surprised at how frustrating the experience was, in several ways feeling like stepping back in time a couple decades. Thankfully assignments since have accepted PDFs so using Pages is no problem.
I sometimes wonder if Keynote will suffer now that Jobs is gone and the Apple keynotes have gone to using videos ever since the pandemic. I don’t think Cook ever liked doing the live demos, so the videos are likely here to stay. The presentations Jobs did were a big driver of Keynote’s development.
If you haven’t seen it, there is an interview with the guy who put those presentations together for 20 years. It’s pretty interesting.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210205063616/https://www.cake....
That thing about the presentation having a color scheme match the emotion and villains and heroes.
Is there an essay that analyzes the iPhone launch as you would a book or a movie?
They mention a book, book seems like it never came out?
I don’t think that will affect it. Apple’s public use of Keynote has always been very basic
Keynote is great if you are making a presentation for yourself and you don't need to share or collaborate on it. Otherwise, interoperability trumps features, and either Google Slides or PowerPoint is good enough and more likely to be compatible with your collaborators. It is sad, I'd love to use Keynote too, but the sharing barrier is just not worth it in 99% of my use cases.
edit: I think Figma slides has an uphill battle ahead for the same reason.
Keynote has had real time collaboration[0] for years. It's great.
[0] https://support.apple.com/guide/keynote/intro-to-collaborati...
Agree 1000%
After I struggled with PowerPoint and Google Slides, Keynote was what I was super comfortable with and could very easily express what I wanted to. It’s the first tool I reach out to. I hope Apple keeps this alive for a long time.
I was a speaker at this years Figma Config (ends tomorrow) and we all had to use keynote since it has way better support for video and animations than goog.
I’m sure that won’t be the case next year with this new announcement.
I love Keynote, but after spending a lot of time in LaTeX Beamer when almost anything can be changed temporally within a slide using overlays, Keynote has frustrating limits. For example, you can't animate changing the background color of a table cell.
Also, its tools for editing embedded videos are quite less capable than PowerPoint's.
Not sure if PowerPoint can do the table cell thing. But overall, I still feel the perfect slide making software doesn't exist yet.
My personal preference is the opposite: I came to hate presentations that use animations. Any presentation that can't be presented in static pdf is a presentation I'd rather miss.
There's useful animations—guiding the audience that something has changed for ex.
Then there's the terrible animations—a gif of a meme playing in an infinite loop. These make the slide unwatchable for me.
Agreed. I've given a few conference talks and found judicious animations super helpful when I'm presenting code.
Showing 10 lines of code on a screen at once is a surefire way to have the audience either not read/understand it or to read it, but ignore what I'm saying. So I like to build up a slide full of code by starting with a couple line (eg the function definition), then adding a few more, then a few more, and then the whole thing. Subtly animating the new line in is a great way to highlight what's changing. Double-so if I'm reordering lines. Otherwise the code is just flashing from one state to another and it's not always obvious what happened.
Even better, I sometimes want to walk through the execution of code. I love having a red arrow highlighting what line we're on, and animating it between positions is a good way to highlight that we're moving from one thing to the next, especially with non-linear jumps (like from the end of a loop back to the top).
Animation is an easily-abused tool, but it's also a powerful one.
It’s not ideal to have slides that only work if everyone is paying attention at all times. This animation should not be used to impart information. You can highlight changes in other ways.
I'd be curious to hear how you'd do the execution flow like they mention? Just use multiple sequential slides?
I'm not sure if this is considered animation or not, but I've demonstrated code refactors between slides by adding a colored border around the code in question (both in the before and in the after slide).
I'd probably do something similar for stepping through code. But at that point it's a quasi-animation (albeit, one that can still be understood by pdf slides).
It's not PowerPoint ala 97 with spinning text. It's highlights or a story based presentation where thing unfolds, or perhaps interacting with something without leaving the slides. Adjusting parameters in a graph. Which is hard to do in Google. The end result of each slide could still be compiled to a static pdf. Think like a 3bluebrown video, or numberphile or something. You don't want static for all kinds of presentations, that's hyperbole.
I feel the complete opposite - if the presentation can be distilled in a static PDF, I'd rather just read the blog post. The entire point of a presentation is being engaged with the speaker to me.
Animations are essential for presenting mathematical concepts visually to help more of the audience follow along. Also, rendering LaTeX. Google Slides makes you use other tools and only clunkily lets you insert them into your presentation.
I suggest watching a lecture by Matt Might. I used to hate animations but he used them in ways that I found incredibly helpful to understand concepts like parsing transforms and stuff.
Yeah it's like slide software was bifurcated: either you can actually collaborate (google) or make quality slides (keynote). Finally some hope: Figma actually does both of those things really well.
I'm also excited by what you can potentially do programmatically in Figma. Has anyone ever tried using the google slides API? It’s one of those APIs where you sort of wonder if you are the only actual user or if other people just enjoy eating razors to feel alive.
Footnote rant: And WHY Google for the love of all things can you STILL not import an SVG into a google slide deck?! It's supposed to be web software for crying out loud!
I cannot stand the lack of SVG support in Google slides. When I worked on the hardware team there I hated that I had to import my polished vector block diagrams into slides as PNGs.
There was a 10+ year old bug thread with 100s of +1s for SVG support in Docs. IIRC the reasoning behind the delay was security concerns - seemed like a bit of a cop out, but what do I know?
There’s still one painful workaround to get SVGs into Google Slides! I actually posted it in that bug thread at Google and then ended up with people attacking me like I was on the team and claiming the workaround is good enough. Anyway, here’s how to do it:
Download Inkscape and then convert your SVG to EMF (some PowerPoint vector format I think).
/Applications/Inkscape.app/Contents/MacOS/inkscape file.svg --export-filename=file.emf
Upload the EMF file to Google Drive with content type “application/x-msmetafile”.
rclone copyto --http-headers '"Content-Type","application/x-msmetafile"' file.emf gdrive:file.emf
Right-click on the file in Drive and open in Google Drawings (if Google Drawings isn’t an option, you don’t have the right content-type set on the file.
Copy from Google Drawings to Google Slides.
Enjoy your painful-but-at-least-possible vector objects in Google Slides!
Totally with you on Google's lack of SVG support. SVG works fine in PowerPoint, and Keynote even lets you break SVGs apart[1]. It's embarrassing that Google were beaten by both MS and Apple on basic web standards support.
It also really stinks at resizing raster images, as does all Gsuite apps. It makes diagrams look terrible.
Agreed with all your pain points. I push Google Slides pretty close to its limits for my talks, and it's got its quirks and limitations, but other presentation software I've looked at doesn't have the same flexibility in terms of drawing, shadowing, adding borders to arbitrary objects, etc. So I'm very excited to see this problem approached from a vector-illustration perspective.
What about Canva slides? They are both design focused
Google slides has a bunch of "smart" features, which is when things automatically change without telling you in unexpected ways.
this seems like a pr post? might tagging it with #ad at least
Looks like it should be available in the free plan according to the pricing page.
https://www.figma.com/pricing/