Haiku Deck Blog

We’re proud to announce our new playback page today with tons of great new features to make Haiku Deck better than ever. Here’s the run down:

New YouTube Video Playback

Deck creators can now embed YouTube videos directly into their decks. To learn how to include videos in your presentation, click here. If you’re viewing a presentation with  a YouTube embed, you’ll notice a play button in the bottom right of the slide. Click to play the YouTube video from within the presentation!

New Loop and Auto Playback SettingsWant to set your presentation to automatically advance or loop? This is a feature request we hear frequently from customers who want Haiku Decks to automatically play at a trade show booth, on a lobby monitor, or even at a Pecha Kucha event. Click the gear icon on the playback page to access these controls.

New Slide Navigation Controls

You may noticed that we’ve moved the slide controls to a more convenient location. To advance slides (or go backwards) look for the arrow buttons shown here. Keyboard arrow controls will also advance slides (left arrow to go forward, right arrow to go back).

New Grid view

Want to navigate directly to a specific slide in your presentation? Use the grid control to instantly see your slide thumbnails. Click on one of the slides to navigate directly there.

New Notes Appear on Mobile

As more and more presentation viewers open Haiku Decks on small screens, it has become more important to show public notes in that context. The new playback page does just that as shown below.

Other new elements of the playback page include a better layout for mobile browsers, and significantly faster page load time.

We’d love to hear your feedback! Let us know what you think about the updated playback page by dropping us an email any time!

As the season of giving reaches full swing, we couldn’t be happier to announce Haiku Deck v3.9 for iPad today. As part of this release, we’ve also made significant improvements in the speed and performance of Haiku Deck for web, so no matter which how you use Haiku Deck, we’ve got great news today! 

We made Haiku Deck 3.9 in direct response to customer feedback on a few very important things. Here’s what’s new:

• New Faster Sync and Save: One of our top customer requests has been to improve the speed of saving and synchronizing decks with the cloud. Version 3.9 for iPad and our latest version of the web app are way faster than before. You’re going to like what you see!

• New Support for iPad Pro’s larger screen size: You paid extra for all of those pixels, now Haiku Deck 3.9 works great no matter which size iPad you use.

• New Support for iOS9 multi-tasking: New on iPad Pro, iPad Air 2, and iPad Mini 4, Haiku Deck supports iOS9 multi-tasking. This is a great new feature that will help you get your job done faster than ever. Want to work on your Haiku Deck while researching something in Safari or reviewing notes made in another app? Want to copy/paste notes from a blog post or other document? Swipe from the right to get started with either Slide Over or Split View. More from Apple on how to use multi-tasking or watch this video.

Haiku Deck 3.9 supports multitasking on iPad Pro, iPad Air 2, and iPad Mini 4

New and old Haiku Deck users rejoice! We’ve added an much-requested new feature that lets Haiku Deck Pro subscribers download editable .pptx files! This means you can create your Haiku Deck, download it, open it in Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, or Google Slides and edit the words on the slide. If you like to add slides in one of these other apps, this is a huge new convenience that is sure to help users who go back and forth between our app and others. To access this feature, click the export icon in the app (highlighted in pink below).

Why might you want to export to PowerPoint? Lets say you have some slides that you want to incorporate into your existing presentation and you want to add beautiful visual slides to go with them. Now when you export Haiku Deck slides to merge with your other presentation, you can easily make changes without having to return to Haiku Deck.

What if you love our Haiku Deck presentation, but you want to swap out one of the Haiku Deck fonts with your own custom font? Editable export enables this too.

To make this work, we’re using open-source fonts that may require installation on your machine. When you download, you’ll notice the instructions and links to install the fonts relevant to your deck. If you want to get a jump on this, here they are all in one place:

Please follow the instructions below to ensure the best results:

1. Download the font zip file by clicking this link
   Double-click on the zip file to unzip
2. Find the uncompressed zip file in your download folder and double-click each of the 27 fonts. Follow the prompts to install each font.
3. If you have PowerPoint open already, completely quit out of PowerPoint by choosing File/Quit
4. Reopen PowerPoint to revel in the beauty of your downloaded Haiku Deck

An additional word about fonts…​In order for the deck to look right when you open it, ​the fonts​ need to be​ installed on the ​local ​machine where ​the deck is opened. If the fonts aren’t installed​ on the local machine where the deck is opened, then PowerPoint or Keynote will guess which fonts to use instead of the intended fonts.

Once these fonts are installed, you don’t have to do it again for that machine. If you share the deck with a colleague or friend using a different machine, they *will* have to install the fonts on their machine. One alternative is to share a .pdf which will not be editable, but *will* maintain the look and feel of the deck without additional font installing.