For all intents and purposes, there are but two names in the desktop-presentation app business: Keynote and PowerPoint. Apple’s version might have a bit more gloss than Microsoft’s, but for the most part, it’s an either/or scenario. Each offers an attractive set of themes with an easy drag-and-drop interface that contains everything you need to make professional, engaging presentations.
Deckset wants you to consider a third option. With a stripped-down interface that stays far out of the way as you work, Deckset puts a fresh spin on the standard formula that skips the fancy graphics and hypnotizing animations, and focuses on what really matters: what you want to say.
As soon as you launch, it’s clear that Deckset is different. Where its heavyweight contemporaries dazzle us with floating pallets and sophisticated tools, Deckset doesn’t offer a single element to help with your design. There aren’t any text boxes, cropping handles, animations, or transitions to speak of — in fact, it’s so minimal you barely need to use your mouse at all.
Instead of fiddling with borders and rotating shapes, Deckset takes all of its instructions from a simple text file. Not unlike the lines of inelegant code that are transformed into pretty websites by our browsers, the app interprets the syntax within the file to create a seamless presentation, giving you the flexibility to quickly edit your document whenever and wherever inspiration strikes.
The secret is Markdown. Deckset uses the popular text-to-HTML conversion tool to turn your unformatted files into attractive slides. Consequently, fonts and colors are unable to be truly personalized, but the seven available themes do well to give your work its own character. Without worrying about the design, slides come together more quickly than when using Keynote, but since there isn’t a text editor built into the app itself, we ran into some issues with updating.
While there’s a certain liberation in working with plain text, Deckset’s biggest strength is also its weakness. Markdown might be one of the easiest programming languages to grasp, but mastering the most rudimentary of commands still requires a basic understanding of code. As it stands, its trial-and-error method is a great tool if you’re looking to learn the syntax (and the sample presentation certainly helps), but the app is limiting its usefulness to a rather small segment of the population without any auto-formatting tools or shortcuts.
The bottom line. Watching Deckset turn text into slides is quite magical, but unless you’re already a Markdown pro, the learning curve might be too steep.
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