(music)
- [Mike] Hi, this is Mike Schmitz,
and welcome to another edition of ScreenCastsonline.
Today, we'll be taking a look at Deckset
a Markdown-based presentation application.
Now you may be thinking,
why do I need another presentation app for my Mac?
I've already got keynote and it gives me
everything I'd ever need to make killer presentations.
And you'd be partially right because keynote is awesome,
but it can also be cumbersome,
I'm sure I'm not the only one
who has been basically done with their presentation content
and then spent the next 10 hours
messing with all the customization options,
trying to get things to look just right.
But the problem is that all that time spent tweaking things
usually doesn't add much value.
It may be worth it if you're delivering
a keynote presentation, at a big conference
but when you're just trying to put something together quick
for the status meeting on Thursday, keynote can be overkill.
And this is where Deckset can really save you a lot of time.
You see Deckset basically takes a simple Markdown document
and makes it look like you spent a tonne of time
creating a killer presentation.
With just a few lines of plain text,
Deckset can create amazing looking slides
that make your next presentation remarkable.
You don't have to think about where things should go
because Deckset handles the layout automatically,
and this significantly reduces the amount of time required
for preparing your slides, and allows you to create
great-looking presentations in record time.
Just create your Markdown based content in any text editor
open it Deckset and choose a theme.
There are several great looking themes
to choose from in Deckset, and in version two
you can even design your own.
And that's not to say that Deckset isn't powerful,
there's a tonne of features if you really want
to customise your presentations.
Like Image Filters, Code Samples, Buildsteps and more.
But if you just want to create
a great-looking presentation quickly,
you don't have to make a bunch of decisions
about features that you'll never use.
Everything is controlled from the Markdown you write
in your text editor.
So, if you spend a fair amount of time
in Text editors already
or like writing in Markdown like I do,
Deckset may be the perfect presentation tool for you,
let's get started.
(music)
Before you can use Deckset you have to instal it
and I wanna make sure to point out that
you have to buy Deckset from the Deckset website,
which is decksetapp.com
don't be fooled if you see Deckset in the Mac App Store,
that is the old version,
you definitely want to buy it directly from the developer
at decksetapp.com
once you're at the website scroll down,
and you can either download the free trial
or if you're convinced that you want to use it right away
maybe after watching this tutorial,
you can click the buy button
and Deckset cost $29, is a one-time purchase
which includes free updates to version two,
or you can buy Deckset for your team,
which gives you a 20% discount,
just select the number of users that you might want.
Once you've downloaded Deckset go ahead and open it
I'm going to open it via Spotlight.
And when you open Deckset for the first time
you'll see five tutorial presentations
which will walk you through how to do
just about anything that you might want in Deckset.
let's make Deckset take up the left half of this screen.
And then we'll the Textedit window over here
on the right side.
So we can see how the changes that we're making
in our text file are reflected in our presentation.
That's worth calling out right here
that there's a couple examples for the code samples.
And we're not going to dive into
a whole bunch of code samples,
because that's not personally how I use Deckset
but if you wanted to use this for technical presentations
then the code samples you can see,
are going to look great and it even supports latex
if you need it to use mathematical notation
to showcase complex formulas.
I have to admit that's a world I know nothing about,
but if you need to do that then Deckset supports it.
And as you can see in this example,
the code samples look really good.
But I want to show you how you can create
a presentation from scratch.
The first thing we're going to do
is we're going to give our presentation a title
and we're going to do that by using
a level 1 header tag, by putting one pound sign
or number sign at the beginning of the line
and then typing our presentation title
which in this case is going to be
"Making Coffee Great Again."
So, that's the content
for the first slide in our presentation
and to indicate that we want another slide to be created
we're gonna go down a couple of lines
and we're going to put three dash marks
and that is going to be the Markdown code
which is going to tell Deckset to create another slide.
On the next slide,
we're going to start creating our content,
and I'm going to type out a couple paragraphs
or lines of text,
and I'm gonna type out two paragraphs worth of text here.
The first one, "Making great coffee
"doesn't have to be difficult you just need to pay attention
"to the details and use quality ingredients."
And then we'll insert a couple of line breaks
and the next line is gonna be,
"Anyone can make great coffee at home."
Again, we'll use three dash marks to indicate a new slide
and on this slide we'll start to talk about
the key ingredients.
Again, we want a header,
but we don't want a level one header
I'm going to use a level two header
and the way to do that using Markdown formatting
is two pound signs or two number signs
followed by the header
which in this case is key ingredients.
So, now we have three slides worth of content
and at this point I want to save my presentation
so I can see what these slides look like,
so I am going to hit command S,
and on the left you'll see that these slides index set
are updated in real time,
to show the changes that I've made
to my coffee presentation Markdown file.
So on the main slide we have the level one header
which is the biggest header,
on the last slide we have a level two header
which is a little bit smaller
and on the second slide we have the content that we created,
but I want to add some emphasis
to a couple of the words in here.
Now, I want to emphasise that
you really do need to use quality ingredients,
so I'm gonna make the word quality bold
and I will do that by using Markdown formatting
and putting two stars or asterisks
on either side of the word.
Everything in between those stars or asterisks,
is going to be bold,
and I want to do the same sort of thing
with the word anyone.
So, again I want to make this word stand out
this time I'm going to use
the Markdown formatting for italicise in this text
and I'm gonna put one star or asterisk
on either side of the word anyone.
And once again I'm going to hit command S to save my changes
in the Deckset presentation
is going to be updated in real time,
now it's a little bit hard to see exactly what that did
because we've got this grid view
but if we double click on the slide
where we made the changes,
we can make this a little bit bigger
and we can see that the word quality is now bold,
and the word anyone which has the Markdown formatting
for the italicised text, in this particular theme
doesn't italicise the text but changes the colour
so it's this lighter bluish colour
which I still think looks pretty good,
so we'll leave it like that.
And while we're in this cover flow type view
we can use the keyboard arrows to go forward and backward
in the slides in our presentation.
So, if I wanted to go to the title slide
I could just hit the left arrow.
If I wanted to go back to the grid view,
I can go click on the grid view icon in the toolbar
and now I can see all my slides again.
Now, let's go back over to our text document
and let's add some additional Markdown elements,
let's go back to our key ingredients slide
and let's add a bulleted list of the things that you need
in order to make great coffee.
So number one you're going to need good beans.
If you don't have good beans,
then your coffee is just not going to be very good.
Next, you need a good grinder.
A good grinder makes sure that you're able to extract
the maximum flavour from the coffee beans
after they've been ground.
The next thing you're gonna need is a gooseneck kettle,
if you're going to use the pour-over method
which we're going to talk a little bit about
in this presentation, so I'll add that.
And again, let's hit command S, so we can save this.
And you can see that just by using the number in the period
which is the Markdown formatting for a numbered list
I now have a list of things in my presentation on the left.
So the Markdown formatting for a numbered list
is pretty straightforward,
if I wanted to make this an unordered list
I could replace the numbers and the periods
with a simple dash,
and that would be the Markdown formatting
to tell Deckset these do not need to be numbered
and instead they would have
just the bullet marker icon before the text.
so you can use both types of lists inside of Deckset
and you can even combine them.
So, if I wanted to add some additional detail
to some of these things,
I could go under good beans and I could indent this
and I could explain a little bit more what I mean.
If you want to make good coffee,
your beans should be freshly roasted
and they should be from a quality source.
The best beans in my opinion come from a single source.
Many of the beans that I use come from a roaster,
who gets them from a specific farm.
And by getting all the beans from the same place,
the coffee has a very distinct flavour profile.
Okay, so let's hit command S
and save that to see what it looks like.
And you can see that it indents the unordered list
underneath the ordered list,
let's add a little bit more information
under good grinder, we should make sure
that we're using a burr grinder not a blade grinder.
A blade grinder is going to cut the coffee beans,
but a burr grinder will crush them.
And that means that when we use the pour over method
we're able to use the water
to extract flavour from the entire bean
instead of just the place on the bean
where we happen to cut it with the blade.
Very, very important if you want to make good coffee.
And then the gooseneck kettle,
so the gooseneck kettle allows you
more control over your pour,
it allows you to control specifically the flow of the water
to make sure you're not flooding the grounds,
and you're able to extract
the maximum flavour from the beans as you pour.
So that might be more than you ever cared to know
about how to make good coffee,
but it also makes a pretty good slide for our presentation.
Let's take a look at a couple other Markdown elements
that we can add here,
so again we're going to hit the three dashes
to create a new slide, and this time let's add a quote.
You can create a quote in Markdown formatting for Deckset
by using the greater than symbol,
and then typing the quote itself.
In this case the quote is coffee is a language in itself
and the author of the quote is going to follow two dashes
and in this case it's Jackie Chan,
so I'm gonna create this quote, save this
and you can see what that looks like
in this particular theme.
And this is obviously very useful
when we want to highlight something that somebody said.
Deckset also supports slack style emojis
so let's create another slide here
by again using three dashes,
and I'm going to type I and then in between two colons
I'm going to put Hart which is the slack style code
for a heart emoji, and then coffee and an exclamation point.
All right, and let's save this and we can see
on that particular slide,
now we've got text in the upper left.
We've got the eye and then the heart emoji and then coffee
now that's a little small,
let's make this a little bit bigger
by using a level one header.
So you can see that my presentation
is starting to look pretty good,
but everything that we've done so far has been text-based,
but let's spruce this up a little bit
by adding video and images to our presentation.
First, let's embed a video and I'm going to go to Safari
and go over to this YouTube video that I found
by Stumptown Roasters,
which shows how to brew pour over coffee in a Chemex,
so I'm going to copy the URL for this particular video,
go back to my text file here
hit three dashes to create a new slide
paste the URL and hit command S to save this.
Now, when I save this you'll see on the left
that the URL does not automatically get converted
to the embedded video,
we need to use the link formatting in Deckset
so let's go back to our text edit file here.
In the formatting that we're going to use
to tell Deckset that this is going to be a link
is an exclamation point,
followed by the standard Markdown formatting
for a link which is going to be two square brackets,
and that's where we would put any modifiers.
And then in between the parentheses
is where the URL goes.
So, we'll put a left parenthesis on the left side of the URL
in a right parenthesis, on the right side of the URL.
Let's hit command S again
and now our slide has turned black
which means that the video is embedded,
let's go over to Deckset and let's double click on this
to open it up, and in the cover flow view
you can see we've got the actual video.
Now if I wanted to play the video,
I could click the play button in the toolbar
to open up the full screen presentation mode,
then click on the play icon in the middle of the video
and the embedded video is going to play full screen
into my presentation.
Now, we don't need to watch this whole video
so let's hit the Escape key to back out of our presentation
and the Safari window underneath Deckset
and my TextEdit windows looks a little bit messy
so we'll go ahead and minimise that,
clean things up a little bit.
And then we're ready to start adding some images
to our presentation.
Now, I downloaded a whole bunch of images
which I thought might be great
for this presentation before we started,
and I'm gonna go to my downloads folder here
and find one that I like.
I like this one right here, with all the gear on it.
So to use this index set,
I'm just going to click on this image,
drag it up into my TextEdit document
you'll see the cursor location move
as I drag this across my screen
and then I'm gonna place it exactly where I want this,
below my bulleted lists on the key ingredients screen.
Now it's gonna put the URL for the image there
but it's not going to show the image itself,
I need to apply that link formatting again
and put the exclamation point, the square brackets
and then the parenthesis on either side of the URL itself.
Okay, and I'll hit command S,
that will save that and now the link works
I have the image in my document but it's also Auto scaled
to fit that one line of text below my bulleted list,
that's not exactly what I want.
So now, we're going to go back to these square brackets
and we're gonna insert a modifier
in this case we're going to tell Deckset
that I want this image displayed
on the right half of the screen,
simply by typing the word right.
And then we're going to select all of this
and we're going to place it up here on the top of the screen
so that it gets aligned on the right
before it loads any of the other information,
so when we put it up here and then hit command S
you can see that the image now displays correctly
on the right half of my slide.
Now, that's not the only modifier we can use
and we don't have to select just one,
so for example if I wanted to apply a filter to this image
to make it a little bit more muted,
help it blend in with the look in the feel
of this particular theme,
I could go to this square bracket again
put a space, and then put another modifier
in this case we'll use filtered.
Now, when I hit command S you'll see that the image
is more faded, it's a little bit more dim
and it blends in a little bit better
with the look in the feel of the theme.
So, I like the way that that slide is looking
let's add another image here,
go back to our downloads folder
and grab this one right here
and drag this as a background on our quote slide.
Again, when we let it go
we're going to get the URL to the image,
but I want to create a background image
by using the right syntax,
so we're gonna use an exclamation point,
two brackets, and then the parentheses
around the URL itself.
And then when we hit command S
you'll see that it adds this image in the background
and because it's a background image
it's going to have the filter applied automatically.
Now if I didn't want that filter,
I could go in those square brackets
and use a modifier like original.
And you can see when I use the modifier original,
it uses the original image, it's a lot brighter
but it's also a lot harder to read the text,
so I'm going to get rid of that
and I'm going to use the filtered version of this image.
Another thing you can do to modify images
is you can change the size or the scale
so if I wanted this to be zoomed in a little bit,
I could change the scale to 200%.
Now, I've got a zoomed in version
of the image as my background,
and I actually like that a little bit better
so I'm going to leave that
and I'm going to go grab another image
from my downloads folder.
Let's grab this tall one with the coffee cup right here,
and we'll put this on the I heart coffee slide.
Now, again we have to use the syntax
to tell Deckset what to do with this particular URL
so we'll use the exclamation point, the square brackets
and the parentheses on either side of the URL
and just like the quote slide
that's going to put it in the background
because this is a taller image, all we really see
is some of the steam in the back
and I don't really like that
so let's write a line this particular image okay,
we'll hit command S and you can see
that now we've got the cup,
and we've got the steam rising from it,
but remember this was a really tall image
and so if you wanted to use an image
where the size doesn't fit neatly
into the prepackaged containers here,
you can use a modifier of fit
to get the entire image inside the display area.
so if I go to the modifier here,
and I add fit, what it does is it zooms out
a little bit further now I've got bars
on the left and the right side of the image,
but I have the whole image from top to bottom
and from left to right in the display window.
And that fit modifier can be used
not just for images but for headers as well.
So if we go up to our title slide and we put a fit modifier
before the level one header,
we've got a header which is going to fit
from left to right, on that particular slide.
And if we wanted to break this down into multiple lines
we could use that modifier for individual lines.
So, if I wanted making coffee on one line
and I wanted that to fit,
and then the second line I wanted Great Again
that would look something like this.
Okay, now, "Great Again," is a little bit small,
as a level two header, let's try a level one header
that's still a little bit small,
so let's add another fit modifier here.
It still doesn't look great, let's try a separate line
for each one of these words.
Okay, so now every line has a level one header,
with a fit modifier so that they fit vertically,
and I think that looks pretty good
so we'll leave that as our title slide.
Next, let's add a table to our presentation
and we're gonna do this again using Markdown formatting.
So let's go down to the bottom of our text document,
and again we'll add the three dashes to create another slide
and I'm gonna create a table which is gonna show
the method the cost and the complexity
of some different manual brew methods.
To create the table header,
all we have to do is use the terms
and separate them with this pipe character here,
and you can see by the three different terms
that this table is going to have three different columns.
Now, to indicate that this is indeed the header row,
next I'm going to put three dashes
for each column in this particular row
again separated with the pipe character.
Next, we're going to put V60,
we'll use the pipe character to indicate
that this is now the next column,
and we'll use a number of these dollar sign characters
to indicate both the cost and the complexity.
So, the V60 does not cost very much,
it is a little bit complex so we'll put two characters there
the Kalita Wave will be next,
and again that doesn't cost very much,
but it is a little bit complex.
Next is the Chemex, this is about the same complexity wise
but costs a little bit more
than both the V60 and the Kalita Wave.
After that we've got the Clever, the Clever Dripper
is a little bit more expensive
than both the V60 and the Kalita Wave, but it is simpler.
And lastly, we have the Syphon brew
which is very expensive and very complex.
So, once we've added our table, we'll hit command S
to save this again, and that looks pretty good
but I wanna show you how you can change
the alignment for these different columns,
all we have to do is go back to this second row
which has the three dashes.
And if we wanted to write a line, a column for example
we could put a colon on the right side of the three dashes.
I'll hit command S again,
and you'll see that the right column now at column three
is now right aligned or right justified,
if we want something left aligned or left justified
we could use one colon on the left side
of the three dashes, and if we want it centred
we could put one on both sides.
So, I'm gonna do that for the second column,
the cost column.
And now I've got my table looking pretty much
just the way I want it.
Now, let's give this a title,
let's use a second-level header
and call this comparisons of brew methods,
it doesn't look that great it's a little bit small
so I'm going to change that with a modifier of fit
and that's gonna make it go all the way across horizontally
it will fit it in the header row,
and that looks a lot better.
Next, we're gonna take a look
at something called configuration commands.
These commands give you a way to control
how your presentation looks and works
inside of Deckset, and there's two ways
that these can be applied,
they can either be applied to a single slide
in your presentation,
or they can be applied to the entire presentation.
If we wanted to apply them to an individual slide,
all we have to do is add them in the text editor
on the appropriate slide.
If we wanted to apply them globally,
we just put these at the very top
of our text editor document.
The first and very useful configuration command
that we're gonna look at, is a build list.
And in order to do that,
we first need to create another slide
and it may be make sense to list out these methods
before we get to the comparison of these brew methods.
So, what I'm going to do, is go right above this
and create a new slide
with a level one header of brew methods,
and then I'm gonna make a simple bulleted list
an unordered list of the different methods
that I've used in this table.
Okay, so now I've got my slide ready to go,
I'm gonna go above the level one header,
and I'm going to put ne inside of the square brackets
my configuration command.
When you use these configuration commands
on an individual slide,
they're always going to start with a period.
So, in this particular case I'm going to type
Period, Build, Dash, List.
Colon, space and then whether I want this value
to be true or false.
Now by default, these are going to be false.
So, if I want to override the default
I'm going to make this true.
Now, when I hit command S,
this time it's not going to change anything
on the slide itself,
we're going to have to preview this
in order to see this build list in action.
Now, there's a button here that says Show Preview
but this is just going to create a small window
which is going to show me the current Deckset slide
that's not exactly what I want,
I am going to go and play this presentation
so you can see this build list in action.
And what we see when we go fullscreen,
is that we have right here the header visible
and then when we hit the forward arrow to advance,
we see the next item in the list show up.
And if I just keep hitting the forward arrow to move on
it's going to build this list one item at a time.
So that's what the build list looks like,
let's hit the Escape key
and go back to our text editor here.
And let's add some global configuration commands
by going to the top of our document,
and these do not need to be inside of these square brackets.
So, for example if I wanted to auto scale a slide
which means that it is going to automatically scale
the size of the text to make it fit,
I could type at the top of this document
Auto scale, colon, true.
Okay, now let's go to the presentation itself,
and let's find a slide which has a bunch of content on it
like this one which has both my ordered list,
in my unordered list.
And you can't see the auto scale happening yet
because I don't have enough content
on this particular slide.
So let's go back and go down to that particular slide,
and I'm gonna add some additional points.
Let's add the additional gear that you might want.
You might want a scale to weigh out your beans
and make sure that you're pouring the right amount of water.
You might want to use filtered water,
may sound a little bit weird but the water that you use
does determine how good your coffee is.
Let's go back to this section here in the gooseneck kettle,
let's say that this should be electric
and temperature controlled if possible.
This allows you to dial in the exact temperature
that you want to use, when you pour the water
you don't have to just boil it
and let it sit for a little while,
you can get your water precisely
to the degree that you want it.
Under the grinder, you don't have to use an electric grinder
but an electric grinder is going to save you a lot of time.
Another thing you might want is a stir stick,
this allows you to agitate the grounds
as the coffee is brewing.
And you'll also want a good mug,
this may sound a little weird
but the mug that you use to drink your coffee
does make a difference.
If you drink coffee out of a paper cup
it's not going to taste as good
as something like a ceramic mug,
there is even a line of barista standard reusable cups
called KeepCups, so if you're really a coffee purist
you may wanna get one of those.
Okay, so let's save this now
and go back to that slide and you can see,
we've got all of our content on this slide
and that is because auto scale is helping us out.
If we go back up to the top and delete Auto scale
and then go back to that slide,
you can see now that not all of the information fits.
So I'm going to add Auto scale back in
to make sure that that looks nice,
and let's add another global configuration command,
let's use slide numbers.
So, if we wanted numbers to appear
in the lower right hand corner of all of our slides
we could add a configuration command
of slide numbers, colon, true.
Once we save that, now every slide in our presentation
has a number in the lower right hand corner.
We could also add a footer using a configuration command.
To do this, we type footer, colon,
and then the footer that we want to appear.
So, let's add something like,
"ScreenCastsonline presents Making Coffee Great Again.
The footer is going to appear
on the left hand side of every slide.
So we've now set global values
at the top of our presentation but that doesn't mean that
they have to appear on every single slide,
we can override these on an individual slide basis.
For example, if I wanted the quote slide
not to have the footer,
I could put inside the square brackets
period, hide, dash, footer.
Now, that slide does not display the footer.
It looks a little bit cleaner,
and the slide looks a little bit better.
So, maybe I wanna clean up the slide numbers as well,
I could do the same thing by typing in another line
square brackets, period, slide numbers, colon, false.
Now, my slide numbers are gone
on that particular slide alone.
And it doesn't just have to be changing
a true/false modifier, or showing or hiding something.
If I wanted to use a completely different footer
I could do that.
let's go to the next slide
and let's put in these square brackets
period footer and then a new footer.
Now, when we save that slide it takes us to that slide
and we've got a different footer on just this slide.
Next, let's take a look at some of the themes
that come in Deckset, and we'll also take a look
at how you can customise them.
So, up until this point we've been using the default theme
when we opened up our presentation.
And we can get a pretty good idea
of what this theme looks like by going over to Deckset
and clicking on the grid view,
and we can see all of our different slides here.
But there are lots of different themes
that we can choose from in Deckset,
so I'm gonna click on the themes button in the toolbar
and show you some of the themes that are available
and also some of the colour options.
So when we click on the themes button,
we see a carousel here with all the different themes
that we can choose from.
The first one is this work theme, this is the default one
and out of the box in this theme
there are eight different colour choices
that we can choose from.
So we've got a dark blue we've got a light blue,
we've got a greyish colour, pink, yellow or orange
a couple different whites, and then a black dark theme.
And as I click on these you can see
that the changes are applied instantly to my themes,
so I can see if I like it or not.
But let's look at some of these other themes.
If I click on the simple theme,
you can see what this one looks like
and again we've got the colour options,
so the default is white.
We can select black, blue there's this teal colour,
this greyish colour and so on.
Clicking on the right arrow,
we see the next two themes which are libre
and if we drag our mouse from left to right on these themes
you can see the preview change behind it,
so it'll give you a snapshot of all the different slides
and what they look like before you would even click
to enable this theme before your presentation.
If you want to apply it, as always you can click it
and the changes are instantly applied,
and again we've got a bunch of different colour options.
The next one here is huerta,
which again has a bunch of different previews
and a bunch of different colour options.
Then there's ostrich, career,
titillium, Fira.
And keep in mind as you're cycling through these
that if you don't like the particular colour scheme
for the default ones,
some of these other ones look very different.
Like this fira one I don't like the default colour,
but I do like this black one.
Next is Merryweather
and there's another one here called next.
Then we've got on the next page olive green and Plain Jane.
Business class, Zurich.
Poster, and this one has a bunch of pretty bold options,
so if I click on some of these other colours
like the blue or the red,
you can see that this one really pops.
Franziska, letters from Sweden.
And then Sketchnote, and this one I like in particular
because it uses the Sketchnote font,
and I'm a big fan of Sketchnoting.
And then on the last page we've got the last one here.
And again don't write off a particular theme,
just because you don't like the default colour choice
take a look at all the different colours
that are available here, and see if there's one
that you really like.
So, let's select this white one here,
close the themes button, and now let's take a look
at how we can customise this even further.
Now, this is a new feature for Deckset 2.0
up until 2.0, you could select the different themes
but you could not change how they looked.
But with 2.0 you can customise just about
every single Markdown element that is available
inside of the themes.
So, if we click on the customise button
we see the theme here and to change anything
in this particular theme,
we just have to click the add custom style button.
We'll get a pop-up which is going to show
all of the different elements
that are controlled by this theme,
and we can change any single one of these.
So, if I wanted to change the background colour,
I'll click on the plus icon.
Under the customise theme menu,
then I've got the background colour and if I click on that
I get the colour picker wheel,
I can choose something like maybe
I want to make this a dark theme.
So let's make this black.
Now you can see that makes a lot of my text unreadable
so we're going to customise
all the different elements of this theme
until we get it so it's just the way we want it,
so don't worry about it yet we're not quite done.
I'm gonna go back and select a new custom style
and this time we're gonna change the text.
The text we can set to default left align,
centre or right align.
We can choose the font that we want,
I'm a big fan of the lotto font,
so I'm going to select lotto
and I'm gonna change the colour let's make it white.
Okay, we can choose the scale and the line height
but I'm just gonna leave that for now.
And you can see in the Deckset previews behind me
that that's a little bit better
now we can see a lot of the text that we couldn't before.
But we're not done yet, so let's add another custom style.
Let's change the headers.
Again, the headers we can change the alignment,
we can change the font,
and we can change the colour.
So I'm gonna make the headers white,
and actually I think they might look better
if we change the colour,
so maybe let's choose an orange all right.
They're centred, I don't really like the way that looks
so let's left-align it.
Okay, looks good let's add another custom style
let's go to our table.
All right so in the table we've got the separator colour
which right now is black, let's make it white.
All right, we've got disclosure triangles
which will open up all of the different options
if we wanted to change them or tweak them anymore
once we've got them just the way we want them,
we can click save as a new theme.
It's gonna create a copy of this theme,
and now this theme we can click on the gear icon
and we can rename it, or we can export it.
So, if we wanted to share this
or import it into another instance of Deckset,
we can export this whole theme
so I'm gonna save this right to my desktop
and I'm gonna save it as My Awesome Theme.
Now, I've got a file that I can share.
Let's take one last look at everything
in our Markdown, and also in our theme here
we didn't actually see what the changes
we made to the table look like,
so let's see what that looks like okay.
And I like the way that that looks
so I think we're done with this for now
let's move on to the next section,
and here we're going to talk about
how you can use an external editor specifically Ulysses
to edit your presentations,
and see the previews in real time
even when you are in full screen mode.
If you're not familiar with Ulysses,
it's a very powerful text editor for Mac and iOS
which we covered in depth in episodes 554 and 555.
So, if you want to really dive into Ulysses itself
definitely go check out those episodes.
But there's a couple things you should know
if you're going to use this as an external editor,
which make it really an efficient tool to use
when editing your Deckset presentations.
So, let's open up Ulysses by invoking Spotlight.
Okay, the Ulysses window opens and the first thing
that you're gonna want to make sure you do,
is go to the preferences and click on the library tab
and make sure that external folders are checked.
This will allow you access to your Deckset files
in the sidebar in Ulysses,
once you add that external folder.
So, let's close preferences and in the left sidebar
you'll see my external folders here,
I'm going to add a folder.
And I'm gonna just add my desktop folder
because that's where my presentation happens to be,
but if you wanted to store these in a specific folder
you could point directly to that folder.
All right, so I've added my desktop.
Now, in the second pane I see
all of the Markdown documents that appear there
and there is the one for my coffee presentation.
There's a couple Markdown elements
that are a little bit different with this,
which we'll cover in just a second.
But one other thing we need to make sure we setup
is if we go over to that desktop folder
in the external folders, we need to right-click on this
click edit, and make sure that save links
as Inline Links is checked.
So, we need to select the radio button for Inline Links.
Okay, once we've done that we're ready to start editing
so let's resize Ulysses, put it over here on the right.
Okay, so this is very similar to the view we had
when we had TextEdit open, but like I said
I wanna show you how you can use this in full-screen.
So we're gonna go over to Deckset
and we're gonna click on the show preview button
and the little popover window is going to appear.
Next we're going to go to Ulysses
and we're gonna enter full screen.
And what that does, is it gives me
the beautiful Ulysses full screen interface
but I can still see the changes that I'm making to Deckset
as I write in Ulysses and hit command S to save.
I can drag this window so if I wanted to put it
into the upper left for example,
and I can even create additional slides as I'm going.
And this is by far my favourite way
of editing my Markdown presentations.
For one thing, the Ulysses toolbar
will give you quick access to any of your slides
so you can just click on the one
that you wanna go straight to.
But because Ulysses uses its own flavour of Markdown
there's a couple code changes
that are going to be required
in order to get this to work correctly with Deckset.
So for example you could add an image,
by using Ulysses built in image insertion tool
or you could put IMG in square brackets
which is Ulysses version of identifying an image,
then you get this little pop-up where you can put the URL.
And as long as we've taken the time
to select save links as Inline Links,
then any URL that we would post there
is going to be added to our presentation.
You'll also see in this code
that the commands that we created, require a backslash
and that's because Ulysses
treats those square brackets as links.
So we need to preface our square brackets
for Deckset with a backslash,
and you can see that in this build list true example.
But these changes are relatively minor
and if you like to work full screen like I do,
then using Ulysses index set together
is really an efficient workflow.
Now, let's leave Ulysses let's go back to our text editor
let's open this window and make sure that it fits again,
and we'll cover a few additional features of Deckset.
So one great feature of Deckset
is the ability to export your presentations as a PDF file
just go to Deckset, click the export button
you can choose the format that you'd like,
you can choose whether to include each stage of the builds
or just include one slide for all of the stages,
and you can even include presenter notes.
Yes, Deckset does support presenter notes.
Once you click the next button,
it'll ask you where you wanna save it
and what you wanna save it as.
I'll just save it as coffee presentation,
right on my desktop it's going to produce a PDF file
and that is now ready for me to share via email,
Dropbox or any other file sharing format.
Now, we just saw the checkbox for the presenter notes
but we haven't really talked about
how to add those presenter notes,
so let's go back to TextEdit here
let's go to our key ingredients slide
and let's add some presenter notes
by using this caret character,
followed by the notes that we want to appear.
So, I'll just add some speaker notes here
and then let's go over to Deckset
and we'll rehearse our presentation
which is going to allow us to see the presenter view.
So, here we've got the numbers of the slides,
we've got the slide that we're on,
the slide that's coming up next, the time
and if we scroll through these
I'm gonna just jump back here,
to one that has some speaker notes,
you'll see the speaker notes appear
on the right side of the screen.
So rehearsing a presentation, even on a single monitor
is something that is very efficient in Deckset.
Now, that's gonna be a little bit different
from playing the presentation itself,
so let's go back and let's play our presentation.
And we saw us a little bit earlier,
when we were looking at the video
but I want to call out here
that Deckset does offer multi-screen support.
So, if I had a second monitor hooked up here
I would be seeing all the information we just saw
in the rehearsal mode, on my second screen.
There's also a couple keyboard shortcuts
which are very handy when you're presenting.
You can hit the X key to change your monitors
so if I wanted this on my second monitor
and I wanted my presenter notes visible
on the first monitor, I just have to hit the X key
and you can also send a black screen to the projector
simply by hitting the B key.
We can hit the B key again, and turn the black screen off.
So, in addition to giving you a lot of great tools
for creating presentations quickly,
there's also some powerful tools
for the day of your presentation
as well as some really cool keyboard shortcuts.
(music)
That'll do it for this episode on Deckset,
hopefully by now you've got a little bit better idea
of what Deckset can do, and if you like writing in Markdown
or are looking for a way
to crank out presentations more quickly,
then I highly encourage you to give Deckset a try.
But that will do it for this episode
we'll be back next week with another edition
of ScreenCastsonline, see you soon.
(music)