Background
I’m constantly coming up with ideas for apps that will help me in my daily use. I don’t need complex interfaces, just a few buttons and labels in the right layout (or at least placeholders in the right position, so I don’t have to mess with the CSS). UI takes too long for prototypes - easier to make in Powerpoint. Hmm…wouldn’t it be great if Powerpoint was my UI designer?
Project Details
Powerpoint’s simple drag and drop interface makes it easy to prototype and demonstrate UIs. However, whenever we want to build the “real” thing, we have to startover as nothing ports over from our intial powerpoint elements except the colors and layouts that we manually input. Tools such as Sketch or GrapeJS exist, but they come with a learning curve, a cost and bloat.
Existing PPT2HTML projects exist, but they aren’t designed to be extensible. I want raw HTML so that I can reuse components in websites, apps, and have it be extensible framework so that I can reuse Powerpoint as a designer for other applications.
This project will make my life easier because it allows me to:
- Drop some shapes/images/textboxes in powerpoint for a UI,
- Parse Powerpoint Elements into a standardized JSON format
- Generate HTML and CSS shapes from the JSON
- Deploy an app with Electron or publish a website
Go checkout the landing page. I also wrote a few docs on getting started.