6 Open Source Tools to create inspiring presentations

Stefan Natter
Week In Review
Published in
3 min readDec 13, 2020

6 Open Source Presentation Tools

As a software developer, PowerPoint, Keynote, or Google Sheets quickly become boring for presentations. You want something different, you want to create the presentation with Markdown files, HTML, or JavaScript. There are some open source solutions for that, like reveal.js, mdx-deck, Spectacle, remark, webslides or impress.js. Each solution allows you to create presentations yourself in minutes, push them to GitHub, and share them with your audience.

Personally, I have tried mdx-deck and Impress.js in the past. Which one do you use?

⛓ Links of the Week

  • Last week I told you about ScrollMagic. This week I have another similar tool for you: lax.js. With lax.js you can also make great animations when the user scrolls too. Vaibhav Khulbe describes in his article “Create a crazy input interaction with lax.js. 🤪” how you can also use lax.js when the visitor fills in an input field.
  • I am a very big admirer of CSS-Art. I admire the patience, precision, and attention to detail that the artists invest. Among the CSS artists is Kass. Her Ring camera looks deceptively real, doesn’t it?
  • With React Icons it’s a breeze to add Bootstrap, Feather, Font Awesome, Hero-, VS Code, css.gg, and more popular icons to your React app.
  • Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to change anything in your Docker container image and could still shrink it by a factor of up to 30x? That’s what docker-slim promises!
  • Static site generators are becoming more and more popular. Eleventy, a JavaScript alternative to Jekyll, promises to be another simple solution.
  • While we’re on the topic of static site generators, Speedlify lets you quickly and easily create a web performance and accessibility benchmark. Here are some Eleventy benchmarks.
  • At work the other day we were discussing if and how it is possible to keep multiple React mini-apps in sync with Redux in one document. Here is a clear example that shows how it works. It’s easier than you might think.
  • When I started streaming, I also looked into the topic of “virtual-cams”. Not because I use it with OBS, but because I wondered if I could use OBS’ output in Skype, Slack, and other apps. And lo and behold, it’s actually possible on macOS as well. Thanks to the open-source solution of John Boiles and the other contributors.

📺 My latest Video

🐦 Tweets of the Week

💜 Special thanks to these inspiring people

See you next week,
Stefan

Don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter. 👇🏻

If you like my articles, you probably like my tweets and newsletter too. Let’s stay connected on Twitter, LinkedIn, and GitHub.

This post includes affiliate links; I may receive compensation if you purchase products or services from the different links provided in this article.

--

--

Stefan Natter
Week In Review

I am a Software Engineer from Austria 🇦🇹. I write about JavaScript, TypeScript, ReactJS and NodeJS. 📧 Weekly NL Series: https://newsletter.natterstefan.me