Show HN: SlideBySide – Present slides without sharing your screen
29 points by denismenace 3 hours ago | 17 comments
Why is it useful? - Present slides without sharing the screen and have every one be on the same page. - Present together with other cohosts and all control the current page. - Other features such as presentation collab features.

Why should I not just vibe code my own solution? - Its a hassle to maintain a version online.


jrm4 13 minutes ago
Fwiw, having taught online for well over a decade, I keep (kept?) trying to put people on to the marvel of a virtual machine for this (minus the sharing this offers, I suppose)

Just have a VM that you tell Zoom or whatnot is the "window to present" Now you can do anything, slides and more, and also that thing can be the only publicly seen thing, your computer stays private.

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albert_e 48 minutes ago
Just a datapoint but Microsoft Teams (most commonly paired with users of Powerpoint) has an option to share and present just a slide deck where viewers can tag along the presenter or jump forward and back to view the rest of the deck independently from presenter.

But in quite a few cases presenter would want to control when information is presented/revealed to audience.

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nico 27 minutes ago
The feature is very cool and potentially useful, but: it only works on certain types of meetings/calls, and they way it’s implemented, people get lost, because they start playing with their slides, and then it’s not clear you can press the “Live” button to sync up again, so then they end up interrupting the speaker to say they are lost, or multiple people will say they are not clear where they are…
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denismenace 29 minutes ago
You have the option to limit if viewers can detach.
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8organicbits 2 hours ago
This looks clever. I've seen PPT to web tools before (https://sparkslides.com/publish/, https://slidehtml5.com/), but I think the slide synchronization idea is new. I can't evaluate more than that as I don't use these.

In the past I have liked marp (https://marp.app/) for technical slides as you write in markdown, can use version control, etc. Powerpoint always felt odd as a developer.

To share public slides I've published to GitHub pages (https://github.com/robalexdev/marp-to-pages). I've seen professors use it for all their slides. But that doesn't synchronize slides, last I checked.

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NicuCalcea 55 minutes ago
Reveal.js with the multiplex plugin [0] does that. I write my presentation in Quarto [1] and render them to reveal.

0: https://revealjs.com/multiplex/

1: https://quarto.org/docs/presentations/revealjs/

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antonly 3 hours ago
I am not sure there are many instances where I would be comfortable uploading my slides to a random website?
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nico 26 minutes ago
Treat it more like a cool proof of concept, now you can vibecode your own and use it with your own data
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denismenace 3 hours ago
I know. Kinda hard to develop trust, but I am considering making all slides E2E encrypted or at least have the option for it.

I wanted to first know if people would like something like this.

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kinduff 2 hours ago
Did you explore client-side for the presentation, and just do the collaborative part use a backend? Your backend doesn't really need to know whats on the screen to draw, nor to sync the slides, in my unverified opinion.
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conqrr 2 hours ago
Interesting Idea for engagement. Although I think slides suck in general and often used for one way communication, especially suck for Software Development. A doc is much more preferable and a lot of collaborative docs like Google Doc exist.
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htrp 56 minutes ago
amazing, is this a business or just a fun project? do you have data privacy /zdr guarantees ?
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denismenace 24 minutes ago
No retention at all, not even a deleted folder: https://slidebyside.com/privacy

I wanted to see if anybody wants this too, and hopefully develop it into a business.

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jayknight 3 hours ago
In a previous position, we used Adobe Connect a lot for online meetings, and the normal way of sharing presentations was to upload them to the room and control the presentation from there.

Webex has this as well, but I find that most people don't bother and just share their screen.

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bbstats 47 minutes ago
this is built into teams
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sublinear 3 hours ago
What's the use case? Lots of people use powerpoint and can't escape the microsoft ecosystem anyway.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint/present-from-...

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denismenace 26 minutes ago
The actual idea came to me back in University when I was presenting projects where I worked with other students. This way students can share a presentation only they can control.
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