Show HN: SlideBySide – Present slides without sharing your screen | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: SlideBySide – Present slides without sharing your screen

slidebyside.com

69 pointsdenismenace27 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.

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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.

You have the option to limit if viewers can detach.

The (MS Teams) feature is very cool and potentially useful, but: it only works on certain types of meetings/calls, and the way it’s implemented, people get lost, because they start playing with their slides, and then it’s not clear they 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…

Thanks for the feedback!

“If you don't want people to be able to independently navigate through a PowerPoint file you're sharing, select Private view Hide objects button in the meeting controls.”

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/teams/meetings/share-sli...

I do want people to independently navigate. But also, I'd like to bring them back to the current slide, or somehow highlighting the current slide, essentially making it easy for viewers not to get lost

Including the alt text ("Hide objects button") made this a very confusing quote, until I went to the page.

That is configurable

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.

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/

I am not sure there are many instances where I would be comfortable uploading my slides to a random website?

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.

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.

Treat it more like a cool proof of concept, now you can vibecode your own and use it with your own data

Number 1 feature: live cursors. Yeah, it makes people go wow, but I hope it can be switched off. Nothing less useful than having random movement distracting people from whatever I'm presenting...

Side comment: i guess this is the october 2026 defaut font for Claude? (Vibe coded some landing pages prototypes very recently, always came with this exact fonts)

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.

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.

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.

Thanks, it's an interesting use case.

amazing, is this a business or just a fun project? do you have data privacy /zdr guarantees ?

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.

so the slide automatically deleted once people left?

this is built into teams

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-...

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.

It is an interesting solution that you developed with learnings from your personal experience. Appreciate that! Hope this finds its space in the market. Wish you the best!

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