bento/slides v1.0.19

Download the single file below and open it in any modern browser — it's the document, the viewer and the editor in one. Shipped files self-update through the signed release channel.

• Bento Slides works on a phone. Eight changes land together, because
  individually none of them was enough: a deck opened on a handset could be
  looked at and rearranged, but not written.

  Text is editable by touch. Opening a text box was bound to double-click,
  and a double-click never reaches the canvas from a touchscreen — so on a
  phone a deck was effectively read-only. Elements selected, moved and resized;
  no word in them could be changed. A tap on the box a previous tap selected
  now opens it, and on a table it opens the cell under your thumb. Mouse
  behaviour is untouched: one click still selects, two still open.

  A formatting bar, which is also the only route to any of this on a phone.
  Select words inside an open box and a bar appears over them — bold, italic,
  underline, strikethrough, code, title, heading, body, bulleted and numbered
  lists, and clear formatting. Bold and italic previously existed with no
  visible way to reach them (⌘B and markdown, neither mentioned anywhere in the
  interface); lists and headings could not be made at all. They are real list
  and heading tags in the document, sized proportionally, so a box keeps its
  hierarchy when you resize it and the canvas, thumbnails, presenter and print
  all agree.

  Lists and headings are the only part of this batch that changes what a file
  can contain, and they are additive like everything else in the format: a deck
  using them opens in any earlier copy of Bento, which keeps every word and
  simply shows the list without its bullets until that copy is updated. The new
  tags carry no attributes of their own, by construction.

  Pinch to zoom, and two fingers to move the canvas. A deck opens at
  19–27% on a handset, so it always needs zooming, and the only way to zoom was
  two small buttons in a corner. Pinch now drives the editor's own zoom,
  anchored between your fingers rather than snapping back to the middle of the
  slide, and the same gesture pans. The page itself still never zooms, and
  one-finger selection and dragging are unchanged.

  Press and hold, or right-click, for a menu that belongs to the deck.
  There was no context menu, so a right-click produced the browser's own — Back,
  Reload, View source — which is the wrong set of verbs for a slide and the
  first gesture most people try. Now an element offers Edit text, Cut, Copy,
  Duplicate, Bring to front, Send to back, Group and Delete; a thumbnail offers
  New, Duplicate and Delete slide; the canvas offers Paste. Press and hold is
  the same menu on a phone. The browser's own menu is deliberately left in place
  where it is the better one — form fields, links, and text you are editing,
  where the system carries spelling, dictation and look-up.

  The toolbar can be reached at 320px. Fully folded the bar still needs
  about 356px, and an iPhone SE — or any iPhone with Display Zoom on — is 320.
  The surplus was simply cut off, which put the ⋯ button 36px past the edge of
  the screen, taking Redo, Comment, Export PDF, Share, Language, Help and the
  whole save-as list with it, none of which had another route on a phone. The
  bar now scrolls, so a clipped button becomes a partly visible one.

  The panels get out of the way. Below 700px the side panels are drawers
  laid over the canvas rather than columns beside it. Tapping a thumbnail
  navigated correctly and then left the drawer covering the slide it had just
  moved to, so every slide change cost a second trip to the toggle. Picking a
  slide now closes the list, and tapping the slide beside any open overlay
  dismisses it. On a wide screen the panels are still columns and stay put.

• Code on a slide — and it morphs. A slide can hold a code snippet, syntax
  highlighted, and when the same snippet appears on two slides in a row the code
  travels between them. A line that moved moves; a call that changed position
  slides to where it went, and the lines it passes step out of its way. Nothing
  blanks and redraws.

  This is the deck's existing morph pointed at source code. Show a refactor as
  three slides and an audience watches the edit happen rather than comparing two
  static screenshots — the starter deck now walks through fifteen years of
  JavaScript, callbacks to promises to async/await, and the code rearranges
  itself at each step.

  Symbols with no counterpart on the previous slide fade in, staggered, once the
  movement is already under way, so a newly introduced line arrives as part of
  the same beat instead of snapping in. A word whose role changes while its
  text does not — render( becoming .then(render) — keeps its identity and
  travels, because turning a call into a reference is a refactor, not a rename.

  Highlighting is built in, covers 75 languages plus diffs and Markdown, and
  costs a deck about 10 KB. It is deliberately the cheaper of two tiers: the
  format keeps its seam for full grammars carried as per-deck assets, and
  nothing here closes that door.

• A deck can set its own morph tempo. The default 0.65 seconds is tuned for
  the ordinary case — a title sliding in, a shape growing, a journey of several
  hundred pixels. A code symbol moves about one line height, and at that tempo
  the whole journey is over in roughly 300 ms: measurably an animation, watchably
  a blink. A deck built around small, precise movement can now choose a slower
  beat, and decks that say nothing are unchanged.

  This one is a document setting (present.morphSeconds, clamped to 0.1–6
  seconds) with no control in the panel yet — reachable today by editing the
  deck's JSON through Copy document JSON / Replace from JSON….

• Deck-wide brand colours. The Slide panel gains a Theme section — a
  background, a text colour and six accents — and every colour control now
  offers those swatches above its picker. Pick one and the deck remembers where
  the colour came from, so changing the theme later updates every element using
  it, across every slide. Pick a custom colour instead and it stays exactly as
  you set it: choosing by hand clears the link, because a colour you chose
  deliberately should never be overwritten by a later theme edit.

  The document keeps ordinary colour values throughout, exactly as before — the
  reference sits alongside them rather than replacing them. So a deck saved with
  a theme still opens correctly in any earlier copy of Bento, which simply sees
  a normal deck of normal colours.

• The web demo says where your deck went. bento.page always hands out a new
  deck — that is what it is for — so anyone who saved from it and came back
  later got a blank starter and reasonably read it as lost work. Their file was
  on disk the whole time; nothing on screen said so.

  Saving from the web now leaves a line naming the file it went to, and saying
  that this page always starts a new deck. Coming back after a save says the
  same thing before you start typing into a fresh one, with the name of the file
  to open — and Start a new deck anyway is always there, because some
  visitors do want a fresh one.

  Two things genuinely do not survive that trip and are worth knowing: version
  history and the recovery snapshot belong to the browser, not the file, so they
  stay behind on bento.page when the deck moves to your disk.

• Every deck you save is smaller. The runtime each file carries is now packed
  harder — about 26 KB off a Bento Slides file, for nothing given up. It is the
  same compression format as before, searched more thoroughly at build time, so
  files you already saved keep working and an older copy of Bento still updates
  itself against a new shell exactly as it did.

• Saving into any of several granted folders. With the browser extension
  installed, you can grant Bento more than one folder and a deck saves back to
  whichever one it came from. Two decks that share a filename in different
  folders both save correctly now; previously that ambiguity made Bento decline
  the save. Granting a large folder no longer costs anything either, so a whole
  home directory is as cheap as a single decks folder.

• The toolbar is centred on a phone, and the Save button has its outline
  back. At phone widths the deck title had 90px to sit in and now has 220px,
  because the folded bar centres and gives the title the room it frees. The Save
  button had lost its right-hand border and rounded corner below 700px, where
  the caret beside it is hidden — so it read as an unfinished edge rather than a
  button.

• Fix: several buttons were unreadable in dark mode. White text on a
  near-white button — the main action in a dialog, the toast that confirms a
  save, the active chip in a settings row, and the ＋ between slides. The
  colour of the text was fixed while the colour behind it followed the theme,
  so what read cleanly in light turned into white-on-white as soon as the
  interface went dark. The panel chevrons had a milder version of the same
  thing. Text now always takes the opposite colour to whatever it sits on.

• Fix: audio and video played in a show even with Autoplay switched off.
  Set a clip's Autoplay to Off and it still started the moment its slide came
  up — every time, in a saved file, on any browser. The only way to stop it was
  to remove the clip.

  The flag was written as an empty attribute rather than left off, and the
  slideshow engine treats an attribute that is present as a yes, whatever it
  says. Bento's own check read the value and was right; it simply never got
  asked. Present since audio and video arrived.

• Fix: a fading slide painted over the morph behind it. When a slide set to
  fade handed off to a morph, the outgoing slide dissolved on top of the
  animation — a 450 ms curtain over a 600 ms move — so the elements appeared to
  jump straight to their new arrangement. They had been travelling the whole
  time, underneath. Slides that hand off to a morph now cut instead.

• Fix: a formula's new symbols appeared instantly instead of fading in. A
  formula gaining a term showed that term snapping into place while every other
  symbol glided. Bento's animation engine recognised HTML and SVG elements but
  not MathML ones, so the fade was quietly written to the wrong place and never
  reached the screen. Formula symbols now arrive on the same staggered beat as
  everything else.

• Fix: the palette swatches had a border you could not see on a dark panel.
  The new theme swatches shipped with a border colour pinned to a light-mode
  value while the panel behind it followed the interface theme — the same
  mismatch the dark-mode fix above removes everywhere else. The border now
  follows the theme too.

• Fix: the toast after saving an editor copy said only "Editor". In seven of
  the eight built-in languages the message that confirms an editor copy was
  saved carried the translation of the neighbouring one-word "Editor" label
  instead of its own sentence, so a German user saving an editor copy saw a
  toast reading Bearbeiter and nothing else. All eight now say what actually
  happened. Downloadable language packs were never affected.

• Fix: a diagram could restyle other diagrams on the same slide. An SVG
  element can carry its own <style> block, and those rules were applied to the
  whole page rather than to the drawing they belong to. So a diagram that styled
  .dot or .label silently restyled every other SVG beside it — colours,
  strokes and dimming rules leaking between unrelated drawings, and the more
  diagrams a slide carried the stranger it looked.

  Nothing could escape further than that: a drawing's stylesheet has never been
  able to load or run anything, and still cannot. This was one diagram reaching
  another's appearance, not reaching out of the document.

  Bento already scoped the stylesheet you write in the element panel; the one
  that arrives inside pasted or imported SVG markup was never scoped at all.
  Both go through the same scoping now, and a drawing's own rules still apply to
  it in full.

• Fix: a two-finger pinch on a phone could move an element and save the move.
  Pinching to look closer at a slide would silently drag whatever was under
  your fingers and commit that move to the document — no visible cause, and no
  reason to reach for undo, so the deck was quietly wrong the next time you
  opened it. Measured on a real deck: a title at (88, 122) landed at (566, 469)
  after one pinch.

  The first finger had already begun an ordinary drag. Multi-touch over the
  canvas was then swallowed so the page would not zoom — but swallowing the
  events did not end the drag that was already running underneath, and it
  committed on release like any other. The pinch now takes the canvas and stops
  that drag, which is the same change that made pinch-to-zoom possible.

  Touch only, so phones and tablets, and it needed an element under your
  fingers — which on a slide is the ordinary case.

• Filipino is now offered to people whose browser is set to Filipino. The
  pack was filed under tl, the ISO 639-1 code for Tagalog, but browsers,
  Android, iOS and macOS all report Filipino as fil / fil-PH — so the pack
  could never be picked up automatically and only appeared if you went looking
  for it by hand. It is filed as fil now, with tl kept as an alias so a
  system that does report the old code still lands on it, and so a file already
  carrying the pack keeps working. Turkmen (tk) was checked at the same time
  and needed no change: tk-TM is what a Turkmen system reports.

• Fix: a single click could leave an element stuck to the cursor, and the
  click that freed it moved the element. Click once to select something and it
  would occasionally follow the pointer around the slide as though you were
  dragging it. The click that finally released it committed the move, so the
  element stayed where the pointer happened to be — a selection turning into an
  edit, with nothing on screen to say so and no reason to reach for undo.

  This one is not about phones. It is a race between how fast the click arrives
  and how fast the machine can respond to it, so it bites slower hardware of any
  kind: the person who reported it hit it roughly one click in five on an older
  desktop and never once on a current laptop. If your deck has quietly lost its
  layout and you have never pinched a phone screen, this is the more likely
  cause. Measured on the same machine before and after: 22 of 24 clicks stuck,
  then 0 of 24.