I just deployed version 2.4.16 on the server that has the first version of the new line drawing engine of SlideMagic built in. This will be the replacement of the cumbersome ‘connector’ feature that was inherited from SlideMagic 1.0.

Any presentation app needs some sort of approach to drawing lines, especially to connect boxes in diagrams. Freehand drawing and line dragging goes straight against the philosophy of SlideMagic, which forces you to keep everything lined up, evenly spaced out on a grid.

The connectors solved this by micromanaging lines, you have designate a box to be a line box, and then meticulously set the line configuration inside it. The result is a line grid that perfectly scales up and down with your grid. But this can be a pain to maintain, especially if you are working in a very fine grid.

So I can came up with a compromise and added a separate line drawing layer to the ‘frame; of the slide, the background that sits behind the work area of the slide (i.e., not the title and the footnote). Selecting the frame will highlight a Manhattan-like grid of dots, between which you can draw any (straight) line or arrow you want, across the entire slide. This line patter will move with changes to the grid, but - and this is the concession - is not 100% tied to the boxes in your chart. But I think it is a price well worth paying, imperfections are easy to fix.

A side effect, it is now also easy to draw a fat border around a group of boxes if needed.

Below is a bare bone organisation diagram.

Screen Shot 2020-08-10 at 6.55.29.png

The old connector system required fiddly editing, see below.

Screen Shot 2020-08-10 at 6.57.18.png

The new line drawing layer makes things easier. As soon as you select the frame of the slide (click the long bar at the top, or the tall column to the left of the slide), you are presented with a grid of dots.

Screen Shot 2020-08-10 at 6.55.39.png

You are free to add lines from dot to dot across the entire slide (yes, even ones at an angle)

Screen Shot 2020-08-10 at 6.55.55.png

All of this makes it easy to connect boxes in the required way in your diagram

Screen Shot 2020-08-10 at 6.56.29.png

Feel free to download the latest version of SlideMagic and play around with the new feature and let me know your feedback. There are a lot of design decisions that I had to make. Keep line editing mode active to go to the next dot, connect line segments in one shape, dragging of lines (or not). I think the current model works, where lines stay on the chart as individual segments. I will need to implement the multi-select on them though, and work on an algorithm that removes double segments, and combines two consecutive segments into one.

SlideMagic: a platform for magical presentations. Free student plan available. LEARN MORE