Showoff

Showoff was a presentation tool for people who would rather write Markdown than fight Keynote. A deck was a directory of Markdown files and a JSON manifest; showoff serve started a little web server and your slides were a URL.

Because the deck was a web app rather than a document, it could do things a slide deck normally can’t: a presenter view with notes and a timer on your laptop while the audience saw the slides, live-executed code samples, and audience members following along in their own browsers.

It grew well past what I had time to maintain. Puppet Labs took it over and maintains the gem now — my repo is kept around only to preserve the issue history.

Slidetty is the same idea, fifteen years later, back in the terminal.