<story><title>Figma Slides</title><url>https://www.figma.com/slides/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yoz</author><text>At my previous job we used Google Slides, and I rapidly came to hate it. Here&amp;#x27;s why Figma Slides has me excited:&lt;p&gt;- I use animation a lot, for many reasons, such as keeping audience focus on parts of the slide and visually explaining information changes and multi-step processes. It&amp;#x27;s particularly helpful for video. Figma already has much better tools for this; Google&amp;#x27;s are not particularly powerful and buggy as hell.&lt;p&gt;- Consistency. Google Slides will sometimes render the same text object with wrapping at different points on different machines. I shouldn&amp;#x27;t have to manually add line breaks to deal with this.&lt;p&gt;- Precision and flexibility. Google Slides just isn&amp;#x27;t anywhere near as smooth at design work as Figma. I don&amp;#x27;t even consider myself a designer and yet I regularly hit Google Slides&amp;#x27;s limitations.&lt;p&gt;- Layer&amp;#x2F;object lists. (Note: I don&amp;#x27;t see this in the Figma Slides demos, but I assume it&amp;#x27;s available in design mode?) Once you have a bunch of shapes on a slide, especially grouped, it makes selection so much easier. I don&amp;#x27;t want to play click roulette when trying to select one object from a pile.&lt;p&gt;(If you&amp;#x27;re wondering why I&amp;#x27;m focused on Google Slides: Apple Keynote is great but can&amp;#x27;t collaborate through Google Workspace. I haven&amp;#x27;t used PowerPoint much, it&amp;#x27;s okay.)&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: I&amp;#x27;ve now done a little playing with Figma Slides.&lt;p&gt;The good news is that it has an object list. But it&amp;#x27;s only in Design Mode. (So it won&amp;#x27;t be available to free or non-designer accounts - that&amp;#x27;s a Figma thing.)&lt;p&gt;The bad news is that &lt;i&gt;in this beta&lt;/i&gt; the animation tools are even less flexible than Google Slides: you can only choose from a limited set of transitions; those transitions apply to the entire slide, not to individual objects; and there&amp;#x27;s no way to change the timing or easing. However, &amp;quot;smart animate&amp;quot; is one of the transitions, which does a Magic-Move-like &amp;quot;move the objects in slide 1 to their positions in slide 2&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;(Note the emphasis on &lt;i&gt;this beta&lt;/i&gt;. Figma Slides won&amp;#x27;t be considered GA until next year, so I&amp;#x27;m hoping that all the animation tools from regular Figma will be available by then.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>timr</author><text>All of the things you mentioned (save maybe layer lists) are why I fell in love with Keynote, and wish I could use it for all presentations.&lt;p&gt;Sadly, 99% of my time is spent in Google slides, which is like banging rocks together. Keynote&amp;#x27;s ability to do things like introspect into postscript&amp;#x2F;vector objects and align on lines &lt;i&gt;within the object&lt;/i&gt; is one of those things that makes you re-evaluate how software should work.&lt;p&gt;I just wanted to praise Keynote, since it gets so little love.</text></comment>
<story><title>Figma Slides</title><url>https://www.figma.com/slides/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yoz</author><text>At my previous job we used Google Slides, and I rapidly came to hate it. Here&amp;#x27;s why Figma Slides has me excited:&lt;p&gt;- I use animation a lot, for many reasons, such as keeping audience focus on parts of the slide and visually explaining information changes and multi-step processes. It&amp;#x27;s particularly helpful for video. Figma already has much better tools for this; Google&amp;#x27;s are not particularly powerful and buggy as hell.&lt;p&gt;- Consistency. Google Slides will sometimes render the same text object with wrapping at different points on different machines. I shouldn&amp;#x27;t have to manually add line breaks to deal with this.&lt;p&gt;- Precision and flexibility. Google Slides just isn&amp;#x27;t anywhere near as smooth at design work as Figma. I don&amp;#x27;t even consider myself a designer and yet I regularly hit Google Slides&amp;#x27;s limitations.&lt;p&gt;- Layer&amp;#x2F;object lists. (Note: I don&amp;#x27;t see this in the Figma Slides demos, but I assume it&amp;#x27;s available in design mode?) Once you have a bunch of shapes on a slide, especially grouped, it makes selection so much easier. I don&amp;#x27;t want to play click roulette when trying to select one object from a pile.&lt;p&gt;(If you&amp;#x27;re wondering why I&amp;#x27;m focused on Google Slides: Apple Keynote is great but can&amp;#x27;t collaborate through Google Workspace. I haven&amp;#x27;t used PowerPoint much, it&amp;#x27;s okay.)&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: I&amp;#x27;ve now done a little playing with Figma Slides.&lt;p&gt;The good news is that it has an object list. But it&amp;#x27;s only in Design Mode. (So it won&amp;#x27;t be available to free or non-designer accounts - that&amp;#x27;s a Figma thing.)&lt;p&gt;The bad news is that &lt;i&gt;in this beta&lt;/i&gt; the animation tools are even less flexible than Google Slides: you can only choose from a limited set of transitions; those transitions apply to the entire slide, not to individual objects; and there&amp;#x27;s no way to change the timing or easing. However, &amp;quot;smart animate&amp;quot; is one of the transitions, which does a Magic-Move-like &amp;quot;move the objects in slide 1 to their positions in slide 2&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;(Note the emphasis on &lt;i&gt;this beta&lt;/i&gt;. Figma Slides won&amp;#x27;t be considered GA until next year, so I&amp;#x27;m hoping that all the animation tools from regular Figma will be available by then.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mintplant</author><text>Agreed with all your pain points. I push Google Slides pretty close to its limits for my talks, and it&amp;#x27;s got its quirks and limitations, but other presentation software I&amp;#x27;ve looked at doesn&amp;#x27;t have the same flexibility in terms of drawing, shadowing, adding borders to arbitrary objects, etc. So I&amp;#x27;m very excited to see this problem approached from a vector-illustration perspective.</text></comment>