My Experience with iA Presenter
I have been eyeing iA Presenter for a long time. In general, I really like iA as a company. Their products feel thoroughly thought out, with every element in place for a reason. They are beautiful yet functional, and they have agendas that guide them. Even though I may not always agree with them, I appreciate that they have those agendas.
iA Presenter is their version of a slides app, and it is the first app of theirs that I own (actually, not owned but subscribed to with a yearly subscription). I had a presentation at the university and thought it would be a good opportunity to test it. Since then, I’ve used it for a few more presentations, and I wanted to share my experience.
The design is captivating. The presentations in iA Presenter look different. They are still presentations, but something about the bold colors, the large typography, and the writing experience, which encourages you to use less text on each slide and focus on your story, results in beautiful slides. The colors changing over time truly captivate the audience. I’ve received multiple comments from people who attended my presentations, saying it helped them stay focused during the lecture.
Not worrying about the design is nice… One appealing aspect of iA Presenter is that you can concentrate solely on the content of the presentation—you write everything in Markdown, and the app designs the slide according to the viewing device. This makes the slides responsive, and you can control high-level structural decisions using standard heading and formatting specifications of Markdown. As a Markdown lover, I appreciate this; it makes writing a slide easy—you simply write the text and get a beautiful slide.
But it doesn’t always work the way you want it to.
Sometimes the “leave the design to the app” approach is beneficial because you can focus on the content, but at times the design may not align with your vision for conveying your message. Occasionally, you want to place headings next to each other in a specific way or add little animations that we’ve come to expect in the world of slides, but you can’t do that in iA Presenter. This can lead to awkward workarounds, such as duplicating slides with and without certain sentences to add an “appear” animation or changing the heading level of a main h1 heading to something like h2 or h3 just to make it look more elegant in the automated design. Unfortunately, the design is not (yet?) a “write and forget about it” system.
Will I renew my subscription to iA Presenter? Maybe, probably yes. It makes a lot of sense as a student (especially with the generous 60% educational discount!). Is it the perfect slides app for every purpose and for everyone? I don’t think so. Is it worth trying? Definitely.