Only partly relevant I guess but I enjoyed such feature quite a lot when Evernote introduced something like that (no MD though) and I have repeatedly used it during company meetings (where Evernote was good to use) … so much faster IMO than PowerPoint 
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Anyone remembers that feature 
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Yeah!
iA Presenter is better in many ways. One being that you don’t need to expose all your text on the slides, but only the selected parts of it.
Of course, it’s also better because it’s a dedicated presentation software… boy, Evernote was soooooo much things at once. Remember their recipe app?
Ahh yeah the recipe app … used it for some time even. Back in those days I considered myself an Evernote and really wanted their shoulder bag and the scanner - not their socks though . Guess at one point I used all of their apps 
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But having liked the presenter feature I think I may give IA presenter a try 
Like iA Writer, if you are all in Apple using every device you have, you will need to pay two prices: one for Mac and one for iOS/iPadOS.
If you also have Windows and Android, you will pay four!
I use only Apple devices, so I would only need to purchase twice. I’m glad I don’t use Windows. 
I agree that in presentations, less words are more. The more reading I’ve done about presentations, and the more presentations I’ve done, the more I see the value of using images as the primary communicator, with perhaps a few words to clarify and supplement. A markdown based presentation app is IMHO barking up the wrong tree, and only encourages a quick and easy “death by PowerPoint” text-based approach.
If the point of a markdown-based presentation app is for people to write down what they think, and then later figure out the best way to say it, what’s the point of it being a presentation app? You could use any markdown app to write down what you want to say.
You’ve hit on what iA is really good at. Any paragraph or bulleted text you start with are hidden from the slides unless you explicitly mark them to appear. They are meant for your presenter notes. Only images and markdown headers appear in slides by default. Triple dashes separate slides.
Say you have this five paragraph essay on why green is a great color. When you paste it into a new presentation, it’s going to look like this:
After five minutes of adding --- and pasting in a few images, the slides look like this and you still have all your notes:
If you want to distribute your presentation with the full information later, you can export a slides + notes export or a PDF document (several other export options, too.)
The whole thing is built around that concept of presenting differently than you write.
So that’s why iA Presenter is not just for making slides but making them while having rehearsals for yourself. That said, structural thinking and beautiful slides should not be separated.
And iA Presenter is more than presentation in a speech or lecture but also social media. You will see the slides can be exported as Instagram Stories format.
And @alvinc based on your comments, I took another look at iA Presenter. It is intriguing, but not intriguing enough to pay a subscription for a presentation app when I arguably we have one of the best presentation apps available for free. 
Another way to look at it is that you buy Apple’s default apps and get the hardware to run them on for free
Fair. 
I just didn’t want it to be misunderstood.
As for the subscription, you already know about the one-time purchase option from upthread.
Maybe you can just buy Mac version only?
Sorry, I still do not see any great advantage in using an alternative to Keynote.
Keynote already has the option to include presenter notes for rehearsals or printing slides with presenter notes, so there is nothing new there. And, of course, Keynote is likewise “built around that concept of presenting differently than you write.”
My experience has been that presentations prepared from Markdown include primarily the text that the author wrote, and there hasn’t been a lot of “presenting differently than you write.” Rather, many see the primary advantage of Markdown presenters is that it does reorganize and reformat what you write. It’s seen as a time saver for turning text into presentations.
I think keynote presentations are much more varied, polished, and professional than the other alternatives, all at no additional cost to me. Others may disagree.
There are many ways to deal with presentation, like drafting on Apple Notes or any text editor and copy/paste part of the important sentences to Keynotes. If you have your workflow best fit for you already, you can choose what you buy, besides letting software design guide you how to do.
For iA, they think Apple’s way is still a kind of disruption of free thinking, and when saving text file it will be many clicks.
Of course I tried between iA and Apple’s ways in doing, I can focus on the latter.
And I thought subscriptions were expensive!
I would just ask you look at my screenshots. By default, an iA presentation won’t let you do this. Not asking you to like it more than Keynote.
I do, but it’s very limited, the one time purchase only applies to one device. That is a showstopper for me.
As I understand it, iA Presenter is designed to let you write your presentation, and then with very little additional effort produce a deck of slides that are very visiual and have minimal text. It’s supposed to almost automatically divert you away from the temptation to put a lot of words up on the screen.
That’s very different from writing your presentation in a markdown editor or word processor and then pasting words and images into Keynote or PowerPoint to create a deck to go with it.
One version not one device, if you have three iPads and two iPhone you will only need one license.
