I’ve only had this program for a few hours, and it is already one of the most useful programs in my library!I am a full time college student and part time educator, so I both take a lot of notes and create a LOT of presentations. If I’m teaching a full lesson, I usually use freeform (or an independent alternative Bulletin) to create an interactive presentation. The downside of those is that they take FOREVER to create, so I only do them for key important lessons.Other presentations, I had been using keynote, google-slides, or powerpoint. They’re fine, but very focussed on the visual UI just for me to just try and make my slides look cosnsistant from slide-to-slide.Then I discovered IA Presenter. A markdown editor that creates a slide show‽‽ Sign me up!It normally takes me 4 hours to prep my presentations for the week. After downloading IA P? Only 60 minutes. That’s 300% faster! Insane! Annnnnd, the slides look great too! The HTML export even works in truly any size of window, so embedding it on a site is easier than anything else and looks so professional!Sure, some things are different and there are some learning curves I’ll have to hurdle, but that aside, this is absolutely amazing!Now when I take my notes in a markdown text editor, I can just select-all, copy, paste into IA P and I’m already 90% done. Admittedly, I will still use freeform/Bulletin for my high-interaction presentations, but I will never be going back to Keynote as my default! Only for finishing touches after starting in IA P and exporting for Keynote/PowerPoint.So excited to see how this app updates and develops!

This app brings together so many features that it hits my sweet spot. It lets me write my presentation like it is a paper. At any time during that process I can start to break my speech into individual slides and format they to show what I want. It even uses Markdown formatting which I use in Obsidian daily which makes the whole process less like creating a presentation than getting my thoughts out and doing all of the hard work or creating a presentation for me. There are a few minor things I wish it would do but they might be possible and I need to learn how to do it or they are something so unique that I am probably in the minority. Either way I never felt like this app was anything short of fantastic!

iA has rethought how slide decks should be built. One continuous Markdown document that contains audience-visible and speaker-visible text. And when presenting, you share the audience-visible screen and watch your speaker-visible screen, which you scroll a markdown paragraph at a time, like a teleprompter.Once you get used to it — and given you accept less detailed control than Keynote or Powerpoint — it lets you build a deck fast and present it more quickly (the way the speaker view works) than any other tool.

I had talk notes in a markdown file that I needed to quickly turn into a nice presentation at the last minute, and iA Presenter worked great for this. It uses the concept of slide content blocks and tries to intelligently lay these out based on the display dimensions. I struggled a bit at first to fiddle with the layout — using a few well-placed ‘<br/>’ inside content blocks helped a lot here.You give up some layout fiddliness of, e.g., Keynote, but it ultimately save me a bunch of time and produced a better and more distinctive product.Being able to just focus on editing in markdown and offloading the theming overhead is the killer feature.